Microworlds

by Stanisław Lem

  Todorov distinguishes three aspects of the literary work: the verbal, the syntactic, and the semantic, making no secret of the fact that these were formerly known as style, composition, and theme. But their invariants have traditionally and mistakenly been sought “on the surface” of texts; Todorov declares that he will look for structures on a deep level, as abstract relations. Northrop Frye, suggests Todorov, might say that the forest and the sea form a manifestation of an elementary structure. Not so — these two phenomena manifest an abstract structure of the type of the relation between statics and dynamics. Here we first come upon the fruits of spurious methodological sophistication, that congenital trait of structuralism, for it is plain to see what our author is seeking: oppositions which come to light on a level of high abstraction. Now, this one is wide of the mark, because statics is not opposed to dynamics but is a special case of it, namely, a limiting case. This is a small matter, but a weighty problem lies behind it, since it is in the same way that Todorov constructs his integral structure for fantastic literature. This, by the structuralist’s decree, consists of a one-dimensional axis, along which are situated subgenres that are mutually exclusive in a logical sense. This is portrayed by Todorov’s diagram: “uncanny : fantastic-uncanny : fantastic-marvelous : marvelous” (p. 44).

  What is the “fantastic”? It is, Todorov explains, the hesitation of a being who knows only natural laws in the face of the supernatural. In other words, the fantastic character of a text resides in a transient and volatile state during the reading of it, one of indecision as to whether the narrative belongs to a natural or a supernatural order of things.

  The “pure” uncanny amazes, shocks, terrifies, but does not give rise to indecision (of the kind we would call ontological). This is the place of the horror story, which presents occurrences that are frightful, extraordinary, but nevertheless rationally possible. This genre extends off the diagram to the left, merging into “ordinary” literature — as a transitional link, our theoretician mentions Dostoevsky.

  The fantastic-uncanny already gives occasion to the vacillations that evoke the sense of the fantastic. This is a tale the events in which are, as its reader at first supposes, brought about by the intervention of the Supernatural. Its epilogue, however, furnishes a surprising rational explanation. (Here belongs, for example, the Manuscrit trouvé a Saragosse.)

  The “fantastic-marvelous” work is just the other way around — it supplies in the end explanations of an extramundane, irrational order, as in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Véra, inasmuch as the conclusion of this story forces one to acknowledge that the dead woman really rose from the grave.

  And finally the “pure” marvelous, which again does not give rise to any vacillations between mutually exclusive types of ontic systems, has all of four subdivisions: (a) the “hyperbolic marvelous,” stemming from narrative extravagance, as in the voyages of Sinbad, where he speaks of serpents capable of swallowing elephants;

  (b) the “exotic marvelous”: here, too, Sinbad serves Todorov’s purpose, when he says that the Roc had legs like oak trees — this is not a zoological absurdity, since to long-ago readers such an avian form may have seemed “possible” (c) the “instrumental marvelous” — the instruments are fabulous objects such as the lamp or the ring of Aladdin; and (d) the “scientific marvelous,” i.e., science fiction. Of this last subdivision, he says: “These narratives, starting from irrational premises, link the ‘facts’ they contain in a perfectly logical manner” (pp. 56-57). And: “The initial data are supernatural: robots, extraterrestrial beings, the whole interplanetary context” (p. 172). And: “Here the supernatural is explained in a rational manner, but according to laws that contemporary science does not acknowledge” (p. 56).

  The scientific bibliography of the theory of “robots” forms a thick volume; there exists a world-renowned organization of astrophysicists (CETI) concerned with searching for signals emitted by Todorov’s “supernatural beings,” i.e., by extraterrestrial creatures; for our theoretician even the “interplanetary background” possesses supernatural properties. Let us, however, regard all these qualifications as slips of the pen. We may as well do so, since Todorov’s theory would be fine if it contained only such defects.

  As we know, Todorov calls the fantastic a transitional boundary state on an axis whose opposite extremes signify the rational system of nature and the irrational order of marvels. For a work to manifest its fantastic character, it must be read literally, from the standpoint of naïve realism, thus neither poetically nor allegorically. These two categories, according to Todorov, exclude one another with logical necessity, hence fantastic poetry or fantastic allegory is always impossible. This second categorical axis is perpendicular to the first. Let us clarify these relationships on a “microexample” of our own, given by a single simple sentence. The sentence “A black cloud swallowed the sun” can be taken, first of all, as a poetic metaphor (a thoroughly trite one, but that is beside the point). The cloud, we know, was only figuratively compared to a being capable of devouring the sun, since in fact it merely hid it from view.

  Furthermore, it is possible, by dint of contextual suggestions, to substitute for the cloud, say, falsehood, and for the sun, truth. The sentence becomes an allegory: it says that falsehood may obscure truth. Again, this is a platitude, but the relations that hold are clearly apparent, and that is what we are after.

  Now if instead we take the sentence literally, some uncertainties emerge that make it possible for indecision and, by the same token, the fantastic to result. The cloud, we know, “actually swallowed the sun” — but in what order of events, the natural or the marvelous? If it gulped it down as a fairy-tale dragon might, then we find ourselves in a fairy tale, in the “pure marvelous.” But if it engulfed the sun as did a certain cosmic cloud in the novel The Black Cloud by the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, we shift to science fiction. In this novel the cloud is made of cosmic dust, it is a “cybernetic organism” and it engulfed the sun because it feeds on stellar radiation. The explanation acquires rationality as a hypothetical extrapolation from such disciplines as the theory of self-organizing systems, the theory of evolution, etc.

  To be sure, the results of our classification do not coincide with Todorov’s, since for him science fiction is irrationalism embodied in pseudoscience. There is no point to arguing about Hoyle’s Black Cloud. It is enough to note that science fiction is nourished by scientific revelations — e.g., in the aftermath of the heart transplants there appeared swarms of fictional works that described criminal gangs snatching hearts from the breasts of young people on behalf of rich oldsters. Even if this is improbable, it assuredly does not belong to any supernatural order of things. But after all, arbitration might reconcile the conflicting viewpoints by effecting, say, within the scope of Todorov’s axis, a translation of some titles, at least, toward the pole of the Rational.

  Things get worse when it comes to subgenres of the fantastic for which there is no place at all on Todorov’s axis. To what genre should Borges’s “Three Versions of Judas” be assigned? In this work Borges invented the fictional heresy of a Scandinavian theologian, according to which Judas, not Jesus, was the true Redeemer. This is not a “marvelous” tale — no more than any genuine heresy such as the Manichaean or the Pelagian. It is not an apocryphon, for an apocryphon pretends to be an authentic original, while Borges’s text does not try to conceal its literary nature. It is not an allegory, nor is it poetry, but, since nobody ever proclaimed such an apostasy, the matter cannot be placed in the order of real events. Quite obviously we have to do here with an imaginary heresy, that is, with fantastic theology.

  Let us generalize this interesting case. Let us recognize unprovable propositions, such as metaphysical, religious, or ontological assertions, as forming an “actual religious credo,” a confession of faith, the affirmation of a world view, if they have entered in just this guise into the repository of the historic civilizations. From an immanent standpoint it cannot be discer
ned from any such proposition, whether it was uttered with the conviction that things are really as it claims, or whether it was enunciated nonseriously (in “ludic” fashion, thus nonassertively). If no philosopher named Schopenhauer had ever existed and if Borges had invented in a story a doctrine called “The World as Will,” we would accept this as a bit of fiction, not of the history of philosophy. But of what kind of fiction, indeed? Of fantastic philosophy, because it was published nonassertively. Here is a literature of imaginary ideas, of fictional basic values, of other civilizations — in a word, the fantasy of the “abstract.”

  On Todorov’s axis there is likewise no place for fantastic history, which did not happen but might have. This is a matter of so-called political fiction, telling what might have been if Japan rather than the United States had fabricated the atomic bomb, if the Germans had won the Second World War, and the like. These are not uncanny tales — at any rate, no more so than what has actually happened in the present century — and they are not marvelous, since it would hardly have taken a miracle to make Japanese physicists go to work building reactors, and also there is no question of the reader’s being unsure about whether the narrated events are rational or irrational. And yet in just this way objective worlds are constructed, the nonexistence of which in past, present, or future is an irrefragable certainty. So what sort of books are these? Beyond a doubt, ones that fabricate a fantastic universal history.

  Thus our Procrustes has not made place on his meager axis even for actually existing varieties of the fantastic — let alone “theoretically possible” kinds, for which there is a fortiori no room in his bed of torture.

  Let us now take a closer look at Todorov’s axis. It is of logical ancestry. The structuralist is indebted to the linguists, and they in turn adopted this simplest structure of exclusion from set theory, in that here the principle of the excluded middle holds: an element either belongs to a set or it does not, and forty-five percent membership in a set is impossible. Todorov ascribes to this axis a fundamental, because definitional, significance on the highest level of abstraction. However, the essential thing is not the axis but the reader’s act of decision. Reading a literary work indeed calls for decisions -in fact, not just one, but an ordered set of them, which result in the genre classification of the text. The reader’s decisions do not oscillate in only one dimension. Assuming as a working hypothesis that these are always decisions with respect to simple (binary) alternatives, thus dichotomous, one can enumerate such additional axes as:

  (a)

  Earnestness : irony. Irony is calling a statement in question, either its linguistic level (this has been done stylistically by Gombrowicz) or its objective level. As a rule irony is in some measure reflexive. But lest the “deflation” of the utterance should become self-destruction on its part, this tactic stabilizes the reader’s hesitancy, or renders futile the attempt at a definitive diagnosis with respect to the designated opposition. It achieves its optimum durability when the separation of an “ironic component” from a “serious component” in the text is not feasible. “Three Versions of Judas” is of just this kind.

  (b)

  Autonomous (reflexive) text: relative text (referred to something outside itself). Todorov’s “allegory” is a bag into which countless heterogeneous matters are stuffed. Culturally local (ethnocentric) allegory is something different from universal allegory. What is allegorical in the author’s cultural sphere may be “mere entertainment” or “pure fantasy” for ethnically alien readers, in line with the saying: “Wer den Dichter will verstehen, muss in Dichters Lande gehen” (“Whoever wants to understand the poet must go to the poet’s country”). The symbolism peculiar to Japanese prose may be unrecognizable by us, for precisely this reason. And again, symbolic character of a text does not necessarily make it allegorical. Whatever is a normative symbol (pertaining to taboo, say) of a given culture is by that very fact neither arbitrary, nor fantastic, nor “imaginary” for that culture’s members. Whether a given text is autonomous or relative is determined by the community of culture between the author and his readers.

  (c)

  Text as cryptogram : text as literal message. This is a variant of the foregoing opposition. The difference between the two is that in (b) it is a matter of relations among

  objects (events), but in (c) one of (linguistic) relations among utterances. Allegory is a sort of generalization signaled by events-objects (a man, as by Kafka, turns into an insect). The content of a cryptogram, on the other hand, can be anything, e.g., another cryptogram. From the fact that cryptograms exist it does not follow that everything is a cryptogram. From the fact that in certain cultures a part is played by themes concealed under relationships (social, familial) it does not follow that in every culture its relational character (its structure) must be a camouflage for meanings concealed in this fashion. This is why one feels a cognitive disappointment in reading Levi-Strauss, because one cannot discover any reason, psychological, social, or logical, responsible for some meanings’ functioning in the community in overt relationships (i.e., ones publicly called by their names), whereas others are “hidden” in the network of occurring relations and have to be reconstructed by abstraction. Here for ethnological structuralism there lies in wait the same bottomless pitfall that menaces psychoanalysis, since as in psychoanalysis it is possible to impute to the analysand’s every word the status of a “mask” concealing another, deeper content, so in structuralism it is always possible to hold that what occurs as relations in a culture is inconclusive and unimportant, because it represents a “camouflage” for other concepts, those that will only be brought to light by the abstract model. Neither of these hypotheses can be verified, so they are nonempirical with respect both to assumptions and to methods.

  One could go on enumerating such oppositions. Superimposing their axes, so that they form a multidimensional “compass card” — i.e., a co-ordinate system with multiple axes — we obtain a formal model of the situation of the reader who has to make repeated decisions about a complexly structured text. Not all texts activate the decision process along all the possible axes, but a theory of genres must take into account at least that class of decisions which cumulatively determines the genre classification of what is read.

  It should be emphasized that particular decisions, until they are made, are dependent variables. Once we have concluded, for example, that a text really is ironic, we have thereby altered the probabilities of specific decisions on other axes.

  The perfidy of modern creative writing lies just in making life — that is, semantic decisions — difficult for the reader. Such writing was emphatically initiated by Kafka. Todorov, unable to cope with Kafka’s texts by means of his axis, has made a virtue of methodological paralysis, taking his own perplexity out into the deep waters of hermeneutics. According to him, Kafka conferred “complete autonomy” on his text; he cut it off from the world in all directions. The text seems to be allegorical but is not, since there is no way of ascertaining to what court it addresses its appeal. Hence it is neither allegorical nor poetic nor realistic, and if it can be called “fantastic,” then only in the sense that “dream logic” has engulfed the narrative together with the reader. (“Son monde tout entière obéit a une logique onirique sinon cauchemardesque, qui n’a plus rien à voir avec le réel” [p. 181].) Ita dixit Todorov, without noticing that he has hereby abandoned all his structuralizing.

  Todorov’s conception of Kafka’s works as totally lacking an address (as reflexive) in the real world (“n’a plus rien à voir avec le réel”) has become popular also outside structuralist circles, I think, as a result of intellectual laziness. These works, boundlessly veiled in meanings, seem to signify so much at once that no one knows what they mean concretely. Well, then, let it be that they simply mean nothing, whether referentially, allusively, or evocatively.

  If there existed an experimental science of literature concerned with studying readers’ reactions to deliberately prepared texts, it wou
ld prove in short order that a text wholly severed from the world with regard to its meanings can be of no interest to anyone. References of expressions to extralinguistic states of affairs form a continuous spectrum, ranging from ostensive denotation to an aura of allusions hard to define, just as recall of things seen to our visual memory ranges from sharp perception in broad daylight to the vagueness of a nocturnal phantom in the dark. Consequently, a boundary between “undisguised reference” and “hermetic autonomy” of a text can be drawn only arbitrarily, because the distinction is extremely fuzzy.

  A representative of impressionistic criticism might say that Kafka’s writing “shimmers with mirages of infinite meanings,” but an advocate of scientific criticism must uncover the tactics that bring this state of things about, not hand the texts a charter certifying their independence of the visible world. We have sketched above a way of effecting the transition from texts that are decisionally unimodal, simple ones, such as the detective story, to those that are n-modal. A work that embodies the relational paradigmatics of the “compass card” thereby sets up an undecidability about its own meaning in that it persistently defies that “instrument of semantic diagnosis” which every human head contains. There then takes place the stabilization of a shaky equilibrium at the crossroads formed by the text itself, since we cannot even say whether it is definitely in earnest or definitely ironic, whether it belongs to the one world or to the other, whether it elevates our vale of tears to the level of transcendence (as some critics said about Kafka’s The Castle) or whether, on the contrary, it degrades the beyond to the temporal plane (as others said about The Castle), whether it is a parable with a moral expressed by symbols from the unconscious (this is the thesis of psychoanalytic criticism), or whether it constitutes “the fantastic without limits” — which last is the dodge our structuralist uses.