Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

According to Ubik, people who, like Runciter’s wife, have spent years in cold sleep are well aware of the fact. It is another matter with those who, like Joe Chip, have come close to meeting with a violent end and have regained consciousness imagining that they have escaped death, whereas in fact they are resting in a moratorium. In the book, it must be admitted, this is an unclear point, which is however masked by another dilemma: if the world of the frozen person’s experiences is a purely subjective one, then any intervention in that world from outside must be for him a phenomenon that upsets the normal course of things. So if someone communicates with the frozen one, as Runciter does with Chip, this contact is accompanied in Chip’s experiences by uncanny and startling phenomena — it is as if waking reality were breaking into the midst of a dream “only from one side,” without thereby causing extinction of the dream and wakening of the sleeper (who, after all, cannot wake up like a normal man because he is not a normal man). But, to go a step further, is not contact also possible between two frozen individuals? Might not one of these people dream that he is alive and well and that from his accustomed world he is communicating with the other one — that only the other person succumbed to the unfortunate mishap? This, too, is possible. And, finally, is it possible to imagine a wholly infallible technology? There can be no such thing. Hence certain perturbations may affect the subjective world of the frozen sleeper, to whom it will then seem that his environment is going mad — perhaps that in it even time is falling to pieces! Interpreting the events presented in this fashion, we come to the conclusion that all the principal characters of the story were killed by the bomb on the moon, and consequently all of them had to be placed in the moratorium, and from this point on the book recounts only their visions and illusions. In a realistic novel (but this is a contradictio in adiecto) this version would correspond to a narrative that, after coming to the demise of the hero, would go on to describe his life after death. The realistic novel cannot describe this life, since the principle of realism rules out such descriptions. If, however, we assume a technology that makes possible the half-life of the dead, nothing prevents the author from remaining faithful to his characters and following them with his narrative — into the depths of their icy dream, which is henceforward the only form of life open to them.

Thus it is possible to rationalize the story in the above manner — on which, however, I would not insist too seriously, and that for two reasons at once. The first reason is that to make the plot fully consistent along the lines sketched above is impossible. If all Runciter’s people perished on the moon, then who transported them to the moratorium? Another thing that does not yield to any rationalization is the talent of the girl who by mental effort alone was able to alter the present by transposing causal nodes in a past already over and done with. (This takes place before the occurrence on the moon, when there are no grounds for regarding the represented world as the purely subjective one of any half-life character.) Similar misgivings are inspired by Ubik itself, “the Absolute in a spray can,” to which we will devote attention a little later on. If we approach the fictional world pedantically, no case can be made for it, since it is full of contradictions. But if we shelve such objections and inquire instead after the overall meaning of the work, we will discover that it is close to the meanings of other books by Dick, for all that they seem to differ from one another. Essentially it is always one and the same world that figures in them — a world of elementally unleashed entropy, of decay that not only, as in our reality, attacks the harmonious arrangement of matter, but also even consumes the order of elapsing time. Dick has thus amplified, rendered monumental and at the same time monstrous, certain fundamental properties of the actual world, giving them dramatic acceleration and impetus. All the technological innovations, the magnificent inventions, and the newly mastered human capabilities (such as telepathy, which our author has provided with an uncommonly rich articulation into “specialties”) ultimately come to nothing in the struggle against the inexorably rising floodwaters of Chaos. Dick’s province is thus a “world of preestablished disharmony,” which is hidden at first and does not manifest itself in the opening scenes of the novel; these are presented unhurriedly and with calm matter-of-factness, just so that the intrusion of the destructive factor should be all the more effective. Dick is a prolific author, but I speak only of those of his novels that constitute the “main sequence” of his works; each of these books (I would count among them: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Now Wait for Last Year, and perhaps also Galactic Pot-Healer) is a somewhat different embodiment of the same dramatic principle — the conversion of the order of the universe to rack and ruin before our eyes. In a world smitten with insanity, in which even the chronology of events is subject to convulsions, it is only the people who preserve their normality. So Dick subjects them to the pressure of a terrible testing, and in his fantastic experiment only the psychology of the characters remains nonfantastic. They struggle bitterly and stoically to the end, like Joe Chip in the current instance, against the chaos pressing on them from all sides, the sources of which remain, actually, unfathomable, so that in this regard the reader is thrown back on his own conjectures.

The peculiarities of Dick’s worlds arise especially from the fact that in them it is waking reality that undergoes profound dissociation and duplication. Sometimes the dissociating agency consists of chemical substances (of the hallucinogenic type — thus in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch); sometimes in “cold-sleep technique” (as precisely in Ubik); sometimes (as in Now Wait for Last Year) in a combination of narcotics and “parallel worlds.” The end effect is always the same: distinguishing between waking reality and visions proves to be impossible. The technical aspect of this phenomenon is fairly inessential — it does not matter whether the splitting of reality is brought about by a new technology of chemical manipulation of the mind or, as in Ubik, by one of surgical operations. The essential point is that a world equipped with the means of splitting perceived reality into indistinguishable likenesses of itself creates practical dilemmas that are known only to the theoretical speculations of philosophy. This is a world in which, so to speak, this philosophy goes out into the street and becomes for every ordinary mortal no less of a burning question than is for us the threatened destruction of the biosphere.

There is no question of using a meticulous factual bookkeeping to strike a rational balance for the novel, by virtue of which it would satisfy the demands of common sense. We are not only forced to but we ought to at a certain point stop defending its “sciencefictional nature” and for a second reason, so far unmentioned. The first reason was dictated to us simply by necessity: given that the elements of the work lack a focal point, it cannot be rendered consistent. The second reason is more essential: the impossibility of imposing consistency on the text compels us to seek its global meanings not in the realm of events themselves, but in that of their constructive principle, the very thing that is responsible for lack of focus. If no such meaningful principle were discoverable, Dick’s novels would have to be called mystifications, since any work must justify itself either on the level of what it presents literally or on the level of deeper semantic content, not so much overtly present in, as summoned up by, the text. Indeed, Dick’s works teem with non sequiturs, and any sufficiently sensitive reader can without difficulty make up lists of incidents that flout logic and experience alike. But — to repeat what was already said in other ways — what is inconsistency in literature? It is a symptom either of incompetence or else of repudiation of some values (such as credibility of incidents or their logical coherence) for the sake of other values.