Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

Here we come to a ticklish point in our discussion, since the values alluded to cannot be objectively compared. There is no universally valid answer to the question whether it is permissible to sacrifice order for the sake of vision in a creative work -everything depends on what kind of order and what kind of vision are involved. Dick’s novels have been variously interpreted. There are critics — Sam Lundwall is one — who say that Dick is cultivating an “offshoot of mysticism” in science fiction. It is not, though, a question of mysticism in the religious sense, but, rather, of occult phenomena. Ubik furnishes some grounds for such a conclusion. Does not the person who ousts Ella Runciter’s soul from her body behave like a “possessing spirit”? Does not he metamorphose into various incarnations when fighting with Joe Chip? So such an approach is admissible.

Another critic (George Turner) has denied all value in Ubik, declaring that the novel is a pack of conflicting absurdities — which can be demonstrated with pencil and paper. I think, however, that the critic should not be the prosecutor of a book, but its defender, though one not allowed to lie: he may only present the work in the most favorable light. And because a book full of meaningless contradictions is as worthless as one that holds forth about vampires and other monstrous revenants, and since neither of them touches on problems worthy of serious consideration, I prefer my account of Ubik to all the rest. The theme of catastrophe had been so much worked over in science fiction that it seemed to be played out until Dick’s books became a proof that this had been a matter of frivolous mystification. For science-fictional endings of the world were brought about either by man himself — e.g., by unrestrained warfare — or by some cataclysm as extrinsic as it was accidental, which thus might equally well not have happened at all.

Dick, on the other hand, by introducing into the annihilation ploy — the tempo of which becomes more violent as the action progresses — instruments of civilization such as hallucinogens, effects such a commingling of the convulsions of technology with those of human experience that it is no longer apparent just what works the terrible wonders -a deus ex machina or a machina ex deo, historical accident or historical necessity. It is difficult to elucidate Dick’s position in this regard, because in particular novels he has given mutually incongruent answers to this question. Appeal to transcendence appears now as a mere possibility for the reader’s conjectures, now as a diagnostic near-certainty. In Ubik, as we have said, a conjectural solution which refuses to explain events in terms of some version of occultism or spiritualism finds support in the bizarre technology of half-life as the last chance offered by medicine to people on the point of death. But earlier, in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, transcendental evil emanates from the titular hero — that is, by the way, rather low-grade metaphysics, being akin to hack treatments of “supernatural visitations” and “ghosts,” and all that saves the thing from turning into a fiasco is the author’s virtuosity as a storyteller. And in Galactic Pot-Healer we have to do with a fabulous parable about a sunken cathedral on some planet and about the struggle that takes place between Light and Darkness over raising it, so that the last semblance of literalness of events vanishes here. Dick is, so I instinctively judge, perfidious in that he does not give unambiguous answers to the questions provoked by reading him, in that he strikes no balances and explains nothing “scientifically,” but instead just confounds things, not only in the plot itself but also with respect to a superordinated category: the literary convention within which the story unfolds. For all that Galactic Pot-Healer leans toward allegory, it does not adopt this position either unambiguously or definitively, and a like indeterminacy as to genre is also characteristic of other novels by Dick, perhaps to an even higher degree. We thus encounter here the same difficulty about genre placement of a work that we met with in the writing of Kafka.

It should be emphasized that the genre affiliation of a creative work is not an abstract problem of interest only to theorists of literature. It is an indispensable prerequisite to the reading of a work. The difference between the theorist and the ordinary reader reduces itself to the fact that the latter places the book he has read in a specific genre automatically, under the influence of his internalized experiences — in the same way that we employ our native language automatically, even when we do not know its morphology or syntax from specialized studies. The convention proper to a concrete genre becomes fixed with the passage of time and is familiar to every qualified reader; consequently, “everybody knows” that in a realistic novel the author cannot cause his hero to walk through closed doors, but can on the other hand reveal to the reader the content of a dream the hero has and forgets before he wakes up (although the one thing is as impossible as the other from a common-sense point of view). The convention of the detective story requires that the perpetrator of a crime be found out, while the convention of science fiction requires rational accounting for events that are quite improbable and even seemingly at odds with logic and experience. On the other hand, the evolution of literary genres is based precisely on violation of storytelling conventions which have already become static. So Dick’s novels in some measure violate the convention of science fiction, which can be accounted to him as merit, because they thereby acquire broadened meanings having allegorical import. This import cannot be exactly determined; the indefiniteness that originates from this favors the emergence of an aura of enigmatic mystery about the work. What is involved is a modern authorial strategy, which some people may find intolerable, but which cannot be assailed with factual arguments, since the demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature. The critics and readers who hold Dick’s “impurity” with respect to genre against him are fossilized traditionalists, and a counterpart to their attitude would be an insistence that prosaists should keep on writing in the manner of Zola and Balzac, and only thus. In the light of the foregoing observations one can understand better the peculiarity and uniqueness of the place occupied by Dick in science fiction. His novels throw many readers accustomed to standard science fiction into abiding confusion, and give rise to complaints, as naïve as they are wrathful, that Dick, instead of providing “precise explanations” by way of conclusion, instead of solving puzzles, sweeps things under the rug. In relation to Kafka, analogous objections would consist in demanding that The Metamorphosis should conclude with an explicit “entomological justification,” making plain when and under what circumstances a normal man can turn into a bug, and that The Trial should explain just what Mr. K. is accused of.

Philip Dick does not lead his critics an easy life, since he does not so much play the part of a guide through his fantasmagoric worlds as he gives the impression of one lost in their labyrinth. He has stood all the more in need of critical assistance, but has not received it, and has gone on writing while labeled a “mystic” and thrown back entirely on his own resources. There is no telling whether or how his work would have changed if it had come under the scrutinies of genuine critics. Perhaps such change would not have been all that much to the good. A second characteristic trait of Dick’s work, after its ambiguity as to genre, is its tawdriness, which is not without a certain charm, being reminiscent of the goods offered at county fairs by primitive craftsmen who are at once clever and naïve, possessed of more talent than self-knowledge. Dick has as a rule taken over a rubble of building materials from the run-of-the-mill American professionals of science fiction, frequently adding a true gleam of originality to already worn-out concepts and, what is surely more important, erecting with such material constructions truly his own. The world gone mad, with a spasmodic flow of time and a network of causes and effects that wriggles as if nauseated, the world of frenzied physics, is unquestionably his invention, being an inversion of our familiar standard according to which only we, but never our environment, may fall victim to psychosis. Ordinarily, the heroes of science fiction are overtaken by only two kinds of calamities: the social, such as the “infernos of police-state tyranny,” and the physical, such as catastrophes caused by nature. Evil is thus inflicted on people either by other people (invaders from the stars are merely people in monstrous disguises) or by the blind forces of matter.