Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

The new cosmology also explains the fact, known since the 1960s, that mathematics takes many forms, and the form in which it developed historically on earth is only one of many possible varieties. The foundations of the universe were changed and reconstructed precisely through these different mathematics. The multitude of mathematical systems is an image of the multitude of possibilities of cosmogonic creation available at the dawn of cosmic history.

We will not dwell further on this new cosmogony of the twenty-first century, which considered the universe to be the result of intentional actions; nor will we describe at length the new philosophical syntheses based on its models. In brief, these posited a dialectical triad composed of a thesis: the universe created by God; its antithesis: the universe as a nonintentional object; and their synthesis: the empirical interrelation of the two previous models, which, developed further, does away with transcendence and replaces it with metagalactically plural reason. Let us instead point out the relations between the three variations of science fiction we have cited above and the canons of literature.

The first work — on preventing earthquakes — might be best treated as an adventure novel or a technological “project” novel. What could be easier than to populate its setting with conventional literary characters. The second text — a hypothesis about human nature — might be written in a number of modes, from pseudorealistic to extravagantly grotesque. But whatever mode the author chooses, the central protagonists, whose personal histories are the individual embodiments of general phenomena, will conform to the canons of literature.

The third theme, however, does not seem conducive to the same kind of literary treatment — at least if the traditional narrative structures are upheld, complete with the characterization of heroes bound to specific situations. The intellectual adventures of the new cosmogony’s creators will not be contained by traditional naturalistic or realistic narrative structures. We need not know about these scientists’ wives, children, and acquaintances, any more than about Newton’s or Planck’s social and marital lives. Here we cannot simply present a social-cultural background against which purely personal events take place; the concept requires the chronicle of an idea, not of the vicissitudes of a few individuals. Of course, with sufficient obstinacy, we could apply the traditional solutions to this situation as well; but then all higher abstractions would be systematically detached from the minute human gestures, reactions, recognitions, personal conflicts, separations, etc., that make up the ordinary substance of the novel. Narrative structures of literature are incapable of synthesizing the “microscopic” elements of the cosmogonic scientists’ everyday lives with the general hypotheses of their new cosmogony. To attempt such a synthesis would lead to a fractured work, with literary fragments, on the one hand, and discursive passages summarizing the new cosmogonic views, on the other. What is needed is an entirely new narrative structure, one that might be modeled on historiography, the biographies of scientists, or perhaps a collage of excerpts from scientific texts, press clippings, the addresses of Nobel laureates, or other facsimiles.

We are in no way suggesting that science fiction should renounce altogether its traditional structures of writing, in order to substitute as yet entirely unproven ones. Our example has a different purpose: it seeks to demonstrate that not all dramas and adventures of the human spirit in search of knowledge can be adequately represented through the traditional canons of the novel or epic narrative. In other words, the potential treasury of the narrative structures of science fiction has not yet been satisfactorily exploited.

In the course of writing this book, we suppressed the temptation to elaborate a metatheory of literary activity that would have dealt with the central structures of literature. Had we attempted it, we would have shattered the already too confining framework of this monograph. Our task here is not to elaborate a metatheory of science fiction, or even of literature in general, but to determine the extent of the field of paradigms, to define the boundaries that can contain the fruits of every possible creative production. Any metatheory of creative work must embrace every kind of cultural and intellectual effort that produces articulated and systematic products, such as music, novels, poems, buildings, sculptures, and philosophical systems. Such an inclusive theory cannot as yet be elaborated, but the time is approaching when it may be fully articulated. Its portents are visible in many fields. The philosophy of science, for example, strives for a metaperspective on the structure of scientific theories. There are analogous attempts in mathematics to define all those structures that are invariant elements of every branch of pure mathematics. Similar researches are being pursued in other fields, such as linguistics and anthropology. It would be most desirable, therefore, to extrapolate the system of universal constants shared by all researches operating with the technical term “structure.” But this term does not mean the same thing to the linguist, the mathematician, the anthropologist, and the literary scholar — indeed, the latter two cannot even define it unambiguously. Now that structuralism has become a fashionable movement, its practice is full of abuses. But these should not be permitted to blind us to the generalizations -even though distant and difficult — to which this method can lead us. We suspect -although this has not yet been expressed as a definite hypothesis — that every kind of creative activity whose goal is constructive and whose starting point is an ensemble of elements and the rules for their treatment has the characteristics of a process unfolding in a theoretically closed configurational space, and that the topological qualities of this space are determined equally by the multitude of potential objects to be constructed and the unsurpassable limits of the space.

Structuralism, as a word and a method, had hardly been born when, in 1945, G. Evelyn Hutchinson — reviewing the anthropologist A. L. Kroeber’s book Configurations of Culture Growth, in the third issue of American Scientist — proposed a hypothesis worth recalling. In his book, Kroeber compares the various periods of world history that were made memorable by extraordinary developments in philosophy, science, philology, sculpture, painting, drama, music, etc. In each of these cultural activities we can distinguish the embryonic and initial stages, when the parameters of all potentially realizable constructs that can be derived from the culturally accepted paradigms of artistic creation are already set — as yet, without anyone’s being aware of it. (Where such newly accepted models originate is a different question altogether. But it is no more necessary for us to answer this question than for a biologist concerned with the evolution of organisms to answer the question, How did life originate on earth?)

In this early stage of the model, the whole stock of structures that can be derived from it is markedly indeterminate; in the course of their creative work, succeeding generations gradually determine the field of possible configurations, until it is completely delimited and exploited. The creative work of every historical period has developed within such limits or boundaries. Indirect evidence of this is provided by the following phenomena. Since the individuals more talented than the norm, whom we call geniuses, are the results of the rare intermingling of genotypes (the “winning numbers” in the “chromosome lottery”), and since these exceptional coincidences of genotypes are determined by the statistical regularities guiding population genetics, we might expect geniuses to be distributed uniformly along the axis of historical time. But in reality, this is not the case; the distribution of highly talented individuals is definitely not uniform and fortuitous. Hutchinson therefore constructs the following hypothesis based on Kroeber’s insight: the chances of becoming an outstanding creator under different historical circumstances are not uniform, since an individual can create only within the field of paradigmatic structures that he finds prepared for him when he comes into the world. Those who are born in an early phase of the exploitation of a given “family of structures” face an enormously broad and difficult task, since the mass of virtual possibilities has not yet been defined. Those born in this state, writes Hutchinson, may perhaps gain the recognition of a small circle of enlightened cognoscenti, but they will not become as well known, or be able to found schools or movements quite as easily, as those who begin their work in the stage of maximal development of a given creative tradition. Thus, the sooner a genius is born within an artistic tradition, the more he can create; but if he arrives too early, he may go unnoticed, and, lacking “social reinforcement,” may remain merely an unknown precursor. The person who arrives at the peak stage of a particular tradition can create a great deal, backed by strong social reinforcement. The artist who appears when most of the possibilities have already been exploited can, at best, become an original representative of a decaying tradition. Thus, the ascents and declines in cultural production — which are evident only in retrospect — are actually movements first toward, then away from the maximum of a certain curve. As a whole, this curve — which expresses the rate at which original productions derived from the embryonic stage proliferate — is additive, and is therefore only minimally dependent on individual successes. Thus, we do not consider 1616 the final date of Elizabethan drama as a whole, but as the year of Shakespeare’s death.