Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

(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 would 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.

It is strange that no one is willing to admit the fact of the matter: that the work brings into head-on collision a swarm of conflicting interpretations, each of which can be defended on its own grounds. If what we had before us were a logical calculus, the sum of these conflicting judgments would clearly be zero, since contradictory propositions cancel one another out. But the work is just not a logical treatise, and therefore it becomes for us, in its semantic undecidability, a fascinating riddle. “Single-axis” structuralism fails utterly for it, but the mechanism of undamped oscillation of the reader’s surmises can be formalized by a topology of multiple decision-making, which in the limit turns the compass card into a surface representing continuous aberrations of the receiver. However, the structuralist model even as we have thus amended it is not fully adequate to a work such as Kafka’s. It falls short because its axiomatic assumption of disjointedness of opposed categories (allegory : poetry, irony : earnestness, natural : supernatural) is altogether false. The crux lies in the fact that the work can be placed on the natural and the supernatural level at the same time, that it can be at once earnest and ironic, and fantastic, poetic, and allegorical as well. The “at the same time” predicated here implies contradictions — but what can you do, if such a text is founded just on contradictions? This is made plain by the throng of equally justified but antagonistic interpretations that battle vainly for supremacy, i.e., for uniqueness. It is only mathematics and logic and — following their example — mathematical linguistics that fear contradictions as the Devil fears holy water. Only these can do nothing constructive with contradictions, which put an end to all rational cognition. What is involved is a trap disastrous for epistemology, in that it is an expression that contradicts itself (much like the classic paradox of the Liar). Yet literature manages to thrive on paradoxes, if only on ones strategically placed — precisely these constitute its perfidious advantage! Not, to be sure, from its own resources. It has not invented such horrendous powers for itself. We find logical contradictions ready-made, firstly in culture: for — to take the first example to hand — according to the canons of Christianity, whatever happens happens naturally, and at the same time it happens by the will of God, since nothing can be apart from this. The nontemporal order thus coexists with the temporal — eternity is in every moment and in every inch. The collisions of behavior provoked by this “overlapping” predication are buffered by successive interpretations of dogma, e.g., in a species of theological consent to the use of anesthesia in childbirth. Nonetheless there is a contradiction involved that culminates in “Credo, quia absurdum est.” Secondly, overlapping categorizations of percepts become the norm in dreams as well as in hyponoic states, thus not only in psychiatric symptomatology (cf. Ernst Kretschmer, Medizinische Psychologic). The coexistence in apperception of states of affairs that exclude one another both empirically and logically is, consequently, a double regularity — cultural and psychological — on which structuralism finally breaks every bone in all its “axes.” Thus the whole literary-critical procrustics or catalogue of adulterations, errors, and oversimplifications formed by this Introduction à la littérature fantastique is of value only as an object lesson illustrating the downfall of a precise conceptual apparatus outside its proper domain.