Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

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

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] Bertaux is a Germanist, and he published the article quoted, “Innovation als Prinzip,” in German in the volume Das 798. Jahrzehnt (Christian Wegner Verlag, 1969). — SL. The passage given in German in Dr. Lem’s original text (from which the first sentence has been reduced to the bracketed phrase in our translation) reads as follows: “Unter ‘Diagonalwissenschaften’ (um den Ausdruck von Roger Caillos aufzunehmen) verstehe ich ungefähr das, was man auch ‘formalistische’ Wissenschaften nennt, also Disziplinen, deren Gebiet sich quer durch die herkömmlichen Fächer der Realwissenschaften zieht… Eine Zeitlang hat man hoffen können, der Ansatz zu einer ähnlichen Formalisierung der Humanwissenschaften sei vom Strukturalismus zu erwarten. Leider sieht es heute aus, als ob gerade die lautesten Vertreter des Strukturalismus ihn zu einer Mythologie hätten entarten lassen — und nicht einmal zu einer brauchbaren. Das Gerede, das jetzt den Namen Strukturalismus tragt, hat den ursprünglich in ihm enthaltenen wissenschaftlichen Ansatz wahrscheinlich tödlich getroffen.” — Charles Nicol, R. D. Mullen, Darko Suvin.

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] Translated by Richard Howard (Cleveland/London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973) from Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Editions du Seuil, 1970). All quotations from Todorov are from the pages of this translation. — R. D. Mullen.

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.