Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

We still have with us the dilemma of the hard-headed reader, who, if he is not scared by a ghost story, relabels it with respect to genre. Todorov would hold such a receiver to be an ignoramus who ought to keep his hands off literature. But when we examine the situation in which someone reads an “uncanny” or a “tragic” text and splits his sides laughing, we will realize that this situation can be explained in either of two ways. Perhaps the reader is in fact a primitive oaf who is too immature to appreciate the work, and that is an end of the problem. Or perhaps the work is kitsch and he who laughs at it is an experienced connoisseur of literature, so that he cannot take seriously what the work presents as serious, i.e., he has outgrown the work. In the second case the text really does change its genre: from a story about spirits (intentionally uncanny) or about galactic monarchs (intentionally science-fictional) or about life in high society (intentionally edifying romance) it turns into an unintentional humoresque.

Todorov bars saying anything at all about an author’s intentions — to mention these amounts to covering oneself with the disgrace of “fallacia intentionalis.” Structuralism is supposed to investigate texts only in their immanence. But if one is free to recognize, as Todorov does, that a text implies a reader (not as a concrete person but as a standard of reception), then in accord with a rule of symmetry one should recognize that it also implies an author. Both of these concepts are indissolubly connected with the category of messages, since a message, in information theory, must have a sender and a receiver.

The words of Roger Caillois about “the irreducible impression of strangeness” as a touchstone for the fantastic represent the psychological correlate of the linguistic state of things constituted by the full-valued character of the artistic text, which guarantees that it is not kitsch. The irreducibility of the impression certifies the authentic values of the text and thereby abolishes the relativism typical for writing with unwarranted pretensions, which produces kitsch as an incongruity between intention and realization.

The relativism of kitsch lies in the fact that it is not kitsch for all readers, and, what is more, it cannot be recognized as kitsch by those who esteem it. Kitsch identified as such forms a special case of paradox within the set of literary works; namely, contradiction between the reactions anticipated by the text and the reactions that its reading actually evokes. For the uncanny is incompatible with nonsense, physics with magic, the sociology of the aristocracy with the scullery’s notions about it, and the process of cognition with the adventures of puppets called scientists. Thus kitsch is a product counterfeited to pass for what it is not. The contradictions in interpretation of Kafka’s writings not only can but must be grasped by the reader; only so, thanks to “indecision of manifold scope,” will he apprehend the aura of mystery established by the text. Per contra, the contradiction specific to kitsch must remain unrecognized by its readers, since otherwise generic disqualification of what has been read will take place. The reading of kitsch as kitsch is nonimmanent — the reader appeals to his own superior knowledge about how a work of the given kind ought to look, and the chasm separating what ought to be from what in fact is amuses him (or offends him).

Because our superior knowledge decreases as the themes of literature become increasingly remote from reality, kitsch takes up residence in regions inaccessible to the reader: in the palace, in the far future, among the stars, in history, in exotic lands. Every literary genre has its masterwork-ceiling, and kitsch, by a tactics of crude mimicry, pretends to have soared to such an altitude. Todorov, fettered by the immanence of his procedures, has deprived himself of any possibility of recognizing mimicry of values, and accordingly his implicit reader must, by dint of solemn exertions, see to it that the silliest twaddle about spirits sends chills up and down his spine. On pain of a structuralist curse he is forbidden to poke fun at such rubbish; since structuralism establishes absolute equality in literature, the right of citizenship that the text usurps for itself is a sacred thing.

A possible rejoinder at this point would be that idiotic stories are written for idiotic readers. And indeed, we observe this state of affairs in the book market, dominated by the laws of supply and demand. But this is not an extenuating circumstance for a theory of literature. A “theory” is synonymous with a generalization that applies without exception to all elements of the set under investigation. Since the structuralists’ generalizations balk at applying thus, or, more precisely, because when they are made to apply thus everywhere they yield such nonsense as no advocate of the school would like to acknowledge (for structural equivalence democratically places the counterfeit on an equal footing with the masterpiece), the theoreticians carry out certain sleight-of-hand manipulations when they assemble their materials for public dissection. They place on their operating table, to wit, only what has already earned a respectable reputation in the history of literature, and they conjure away under the table works that are structurally of the same kinds but artistically trashy. They have to proceed thus, because their method impels them toward simple texts such as the detective story; their overweening ambitions, on the other hand, toward celebrated works. (Kitsch, being subject to relativization in the process of reception, is not the structurally simplest case, for it seeks to be one thing and is in fact another; the detective story, on the other hand, devoid of pretensions, is decisionally unimodal.)

Now we can more readily understand the make-up of Todorov’s bibliography, as to the names (Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Hoffmann, Kafka) and the works it includes. The theoretician has taken as his “sample” that which could not involve him in difficulties, since it had already passed its cultural screening examination and by that token could give him no trouble. A therapist, if he were to proceed analogously, would take as patients only robust convalescents. A physicist would test his theory only on facts that he knew beforehand would confirm it, carefully avoiding all others. Let us spare the structuralist the description that the philosophy of science would give to such a method of selecting “representative samples.” A theory of literature either embraces all works or it is no theory. A theory of works weeded out in advance by means beyond its compass constitutes not generalization but its contrary, that is, particularization. One cannot when theorizing discriminate beforehand against a certain group of works — i.e., not bring them under the scope of analysis at all. A taxonomically oriented theory can set up a hierarchy in its subject matter — i.e., assign nonuniform values to the elements of the entire set under investigation — but it should do this openly, not on the sly, and throughout its whole domain, showing what sort of criteria it employs for making distinctions and how they perform their tasks of evaluation.

These obligations are binding not for humanistic studies alone. They stem from the set of directives to which all scientific cognition is subject. A zoologist cannot ignore cockroaches because they’re such nasty little beasties, nor a cosmologist ignore the energy balance of quasars because it makes his calculations blow up in his face. The sleight-of-hand artist’s activities are not always and everywhere admirable. So, we conclude, if structuralism desires to avoid expulsion from among the sciences, it must rebuild itself completely, from the ground up, since in its present state it is, in the words of Pierre Bertaux, a procedure that from its point of departure in logic has strayed into useless mythology.