Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

Translated from the Polish by Robert Abernathy

I admit that this essay is a very subjective review of Borges’s fiction. If someone asked me why I am stressing the subjective aspect of this piece of criticism, I would be hard-pressed to give a conclusive answer. Perhaps because I have been trying for years to enter the territory in which the Argentinian’s best work was created, although I went by quite another road. Therefore his work is very close to me. At the same time it is foreign to me, for I know from my own experience the traps into which he has sometimes fallen in his writing, and I cannot always approve of his literary methods.

Nothing could be simpler than to list Borges’s best stories. These are: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Pierre Menard — Author of the Quixote,” “The Lottery in Babylon,” and “Three Versions of Judas.”

I justify my preference in the following way: each of the stories mentioned has a double-decker, perverse, but logically perfect structure. Viewed superficially, they are fictionalized paradoxes of the Greek type (Zeno’s, for instance [13] The difference is that Zeno’s paradoxes confront the trivial interpretation of physical processes with the contradictory results of their purely logical interpretation, whereas the paradoxes of Borges are directed toward the universe of cultural facts. ).

In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges bases the story on the idea of reversing our concepts of “idea” and “reality.” Borges suggests that a secret society has created a new world where the mind creates its own external objects, and the only external objects are those created by the mind.

In “The Lottery in Babylon” Borges contrasts two mutually exclusive explanations of the universe: (statistical) chance, and (total) determinism. Usually we consider these notions incompatible. Borges tells of a world system based upon a lottery, and reconciles two cosmological explanations without destroying the logical bases of each system.

“Pierre Menard — Author of the Quixote,” on the other hand, is a satire on the uniqueness of the act of artistic creation, logically driven to its utmost point. (In this story Pierre Menard seeks to rewrite “Don Quixote” precisely — without copying it. The story shows the paradoxes behind the idea that art is created necessarily and uniquely. Borges reduces the idea ad absurdum.)

Finally, “Three Versions of Judas” is a logically improvable heresy. [14] Strictly speaking, what has been said isn’t true insofar as there are no systems of belief (of either an orthodox or a heterodox nature) that would not hide contradictions within their structures. For them, the supreme court of decision is revelation, not logical reasoning. For instance, consider the fact that it is possible to postulate a logically impossible trinity, but not the existence and nonexistence of a God at the same time — although in both cases logic is similarly suspended. The “strictly logical” heresy in the Judas story means that his postulated “role as savior” is proved by the same logical means that belong to the arsenal of the traditional demonstrators of Christian theology. The heterodoxy arises only because Borges does not halt where, according to the Scriptures, any orthodox theological attempt at interpretation must “desist unconditionally.” Borges’s conclusions lead to a point which transcends the permissible boundaries, but this does not destroy logic, for this boundary is of an extralogical nature. Borges builds a fictitiously heterodox system of Christian dogmatics in which he “proves” that Judas not Jesus was the Christ. In its “radicalism” this fictitious heresy surpasses all historical types of heresy.

In each story we can find the same kind of method: Borges transforms a firmly established part of some cultural system by means of the terms of the system itself. In the fields of religious belief, in ontology, in literary theory, the author “continues” what mankind has “only begun to make.” Using this tour d’adresse Borges makes comical and absurd those things which we revere because of their current cultural value.

But when we look at Borges’s work only superficially we see the “comicallogical” effect alone. However, each of these tales has in addition another — wholly serious — hidden meaning. At base, his curious fantasy is, I claim, quite realistic. Only after some thought do you first note that the heterodoxy contained within “Judas,” for instance, might really be possible. Such a perfidious interpretation of the myth of the redemption, if historically not very plausible, is at least thinkable. I could say the same about “Lottery.” Under certain conditions even the reinterpretation of the notions of chaos and order shown here may be historically plausible. Both stories, diiferent as they may appear to be from one another, are hypotheses about the structure and attributes of existence. Because they are both borderline cases, isolated to one edge of the real paradigm corresponding to them, it was very unlikely that they would come true historically. Yet, considered from a logical point of view, they are totally “correct.” The author therefore has the courage to deal with the most valuable goals of mankind just as mankind himself does. The only difference is that Borges continues these combinatory operations to their utmost logical conclusions.

Borges’s best stories are constructed as tightly as mathematical proofs. It is impossible to refute them logically, however lunatic the stories’ premises may sound. Borges is successful because in any single case he never questions the implied premises of the model structure that he transforms. For instance, he pretends to believe (as some humanists do) that a truly brilliant work of art contains no trace of chance, but is indeed the result of some (higher) necessity. If one thinks that such a statement is generally true, it is possible, without contradicting logic, to claim that a masterpiece could be created, word for word, a second time, and quite independently from its first birth (as one can really do with mathematical proofs). We can only see the nonsense of such a procedure when we attack its very premises; but of course Borges is careful never to do this. He never creates a new, freely invented paradigm structure. He confines himself strictly to the initial axioms supplied by the cultural history of mankind. He is a mocking heretic of culture because he never transgresses its syntax. He only extends those structural operations that are, from a logical point of view, “in order,” i.e., they have never been seriously “tried out” because of historical extralogical reasons — but this is of course another matter altogether.

Basically, Borges just does what he claims for the fictitious philosophers of his “Tlön” (in philosophy they “do not seek truth, only amazement”). He cultivates a fantastic philosophy, for the characters and settings in his stories are not discursive arguments, but just as much literary objects as the objects which appear in “normal” literature. This group of tales forces me to ask how we may distinguish a fictitious ontology (one that cannot be taken seriously) from a real (historically valid) philosophy. The answer to this question is shocking: no essential difference separates the two. Things are quite trivial: those ontological-philosophical concepts that some thinkers had, and that were preserved by mankind in her historical treasure trove of ideas, and that she therefore acknowledges as serious attempts to interpret and understand the world in one grand sweep — those ideas are our religions and philosophical systems. [15] If Schopenhauer had never existed, and if Borges presented to us the ontological doctrine of “The World as Will,” we would never accept it as a philosophical system that must be taken seriously; we would take it as an example of a “fantastic philosophy.” As soon as nobody assents to it, a philosophy becomes automatically fantastic literature. But ideas that cannot present such a genealogical attestation and cannot show such an assimilation by the real history of mankind (and Borges’s cannot) are just “fictitious,” “freewheeling,” “privately invented” meaningful structures, and for no other reason than that mentioned above. Because of this, they can never be taken seriously as an interpretation of the world and existence. These stories cannot be refuted even when the most severe criteria are applied, but only because things happen to be so. To refute them, it would not be sufficient merely to show their absurd consequences. To refute them, it would be necessary to call into question the total syntax of human thought, and thinking in its ontological dimensions. Therefore, Borges’s work just confirms that no cultural necessity exists in our growth toward knowledge; for we often take that which has arisen by accident for what is necessary, and mistake the ephemeral for the eternal.