A Perfect Vacuum

by Stanisław Lem

  There are no Catholics whatever in the colony, and it is impossible to speak of any sort of religious feeling among the former SS men; it becomes generally accepted, then, for the so-called services held in the palace chapel to be extremely brief, and they are reduced to the chanting of a few verses from the Bible; one or two people, in fact, suggest to the monarch that even these divine duties could really be dispensed with, but Taudlitz is unbending. On the other hand, both cardinals, the Archbishop of Paris, and the other bishops in this way “justify” their high titles, because those few minutes each week—an atrocious parody of Mass—legitimize primarily in their own eyes their rank in the church hierarchy; thus they put up with it all and remain at their altars for minutes on end, in order later to reward themselves with hours spent at the banquet tables and beneath the canopies of sumptuous beds. Therefore, too, the idea of the projector smuggled into the palace (without the King’s knowledge!) from Montevideo and used to show stag films in the castle cellar—where the Archbishop of Paris (the quondam Gestapo chauffeur Hans Schaeffert) does the honors as projectionist, and Cardinal du Sauterne (ex-commissary) helps change the reels—that idea has at one and the same time a macabre humor and a verisimilitude, as do all the other elements of this tragicomedy, which continues because nothing is able to challenge it from within.

  To these people all things are now reconcilable with all things, to them everything goes with everything else, and it should come as no surprise when, for example, mention is made of the dreams of some of them—for did not the commandant of Block III at Mauthausen have “the biggest collection of canaries in all Bavaria,” which he recalls wistfully, and did he not try feeding these canaries according to the advice of a certain camp foreman who assured him that canaries sang, best when fed on human flesh? This, then, is criminality taken to such a degree of self-ignorance that we would be dealing with innocent former murderers, were the criterion of criminality in man to be based exclusively on autodiagnosis, on the individual’s independent recognition of sin. It is possible that in some sense Cardinal du Sauterne knows that a real cardinal does not behave thus, that a real cardinal believes in God and most probably does not go about raping the Indian boys who assist at Mass in surplices, but since within a radius of four hundred miles there are no other cardinals, such a thought does not trouble him unduly.

  Falsehood feeding on falsehood produces in consequence this proliferating fertility of form, which surpasses any authentic court as a mirror of human behavior, for it is true to life in two ways at once. The author does not permit himself the least exaggeration, and the realism of the subject remains uncompromised; when the general drunkenness goes beyond a certain point, the royal Gruppenführer always retires to his chambers, for he knows the old prison-guard ways will win out over the veneer of refinement and from drunken hiccupping there will soon escape those grotesque and gruesome locutions whose power derives from the boggling contrast between the adopted mentality and the real. The whole genius of Taudlitz—if one may use that term—lies in his having the courage and the consequentially to “close” the system he created.

  This system, frightfully crippled, functions thanks only to its insularity; one puff from the real world would topple it. And just such a potential toppler is young Bertrand, though he does not feel in himself the strength to speak out with that genuine voice of dismay that calls things by their name. The simplest possibility, which explains the totality of the situation, Bertrand dares not contemplate. What, only a vulgar lie, kept going for years, maintained methodically, thumbing its nose at common sense—a lie and nothing more? No, never; sooner a communal paranoia or some inconceivable, secret game of unknown purpose, yet rational at core, complete with bona fide and fully cogent motives; anything, anything but simple lying, lying enamored of itself, self-absorbed, self-inflated without bound. The thesis we have been presenting is beyond his grasp.

  Bertrand, then, capitulates at once: he lets them dress him in the garments of the heir to the throne, lets them instruct him in court etiquette—that is to say, in that rudimentary repertoire of bows, gestures, and words which all seem strangely familiar to him. There is nothing strange about it; he, too, has read the cheap romances and pseudo-historical rubbish that were the inspiration of the King and his master of ceremonies. Bertrand, however, is recalcitrant, unaware that his inertness, his passivity—which aggravates not merely the courtiers but the King himself—is an instinctive resistance to a situation that forces on him submissive idiocy. Bertrand does not want to be buried in lies, though he himself does not know the source of his opposition; therefore he limits himself to making gibes, ironical remarks, those lordly half-witted utterances of honored guests. During the second big banquet, it happens that the King, stung by an insinuation behind Bertrand’s seemingly casual words—words whose hidden malice the boy himself does not immediately realize—in a fit of genuine rage begins hurling at him scraps of a partly eaten roast, whereat half the hall seconds the fury with a gleeful howl of approbation, throwing at the poor wretch greasy bones off their silver plates, while the rest preserve an uneasy silence, wondering whether Taudlitz might not be laying a trap of some sort for those present, as he is fond of doing, whether he might not be acting in concert with the Infante.

  The most difficult thing for us to convey here is that, for all the obtuseness of the game, for all the flatness of the performance, which, put on at one time indifferently, now has grown so in power that it does not want to end, and does not want to because it cannot, and cannot because beyond it there awaits now only utter nothingness (they cannot quit being bishops, princes of the blood, marquises, since they cannot go back to their former posts of Gestapo chauffeur, crematorium guard, camp commandant, just as the King, even if he wished, could not become again SS Gruppenführer Taudlitz)—for all the banal and atrocious flatness (to repeat) of this kingdom and this court, there vibrates in it at the same time, like a single vigilant, taut nerve, a ceaseless cunning, a mutual suspicion, which permits one to conduct, albeit in counterfeit forms, real battles and campaigns, to undercut the favorites of the throne, and write denunciations, and in silence wrest for oneself the favor of the lord. In fact it is not the cardinals’ hats, not ribbons and medals, laces, ruffs, suits of armor that warrant such underground labor, these tunnelings of intrigue—for what, really, do veterans of a hundred battles and a thousand murders want with the trappings of fictitious glory? It is the ambushes themselves, the machinations, the traps set for one’s foes so that they will betray themselves before the King, falling flat on their faces from their strutting roles—that constitute the greatest common passion....

  So this jockeying for position, seeking the right moves on the court parquet, in the shining halls whose mirrors reflect their decked-out silhouettes, this incessant yet bloodless warfare (not always bloodless in the cellars of the castle) is their reason for being; it gives meaning to what would be, otherwise, only a children’s carnival, suitable perhaps for beardless youths, not for men who know the taste of blood.... Poor Bertrand meanwhile can no longer endure being alone with his unuttered dilemma; as a drowning man grasps at straws he seeks a kindred spirit, one to whom he can unburden himself of the purpose that is growing within him.

  Because—and this is another of the author’s merits—Bertrand gradually becomes the Hamlet of this mad court. He is here, by instinct, the last righteous man (he never read Ham-let!), and hence concludes that his duty is to go mad. He does not suspect them all of cynicism—for that he has indeed too little intellectual courage. Bertrand, not knowing this himself, wishes to do something that would be realistic, certainly, at a less sordid court: his desire is to say what constantly rushes to his lips and burns his tongue, but he knows by now that as a normal person he cannot do so with impunity. But if he were to go insane, ah, that is quite a different matter! He begins, then, not to simulate madness cold-bloodedly, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet: no, as a simpleton, naive, a bit of a hysteric, he simply tries to go insane,
with all good faith in the necessity for his own madness! Thus he will utter the words of truth that oppress him.... But the Duchesse de Clicot, an old prostitute from Rio, having taken a fancy to the young man, gets him into bed with her and there, educating him in the ways remembered from the time of her unhighborn past, ways learned at the hand of a certain madam, adjures him sternly not to say things that might cost him his neck. For she knows well that such a thing as respect for the unaccountability of mental illness has no place here; at heart, as we can see, the old woman wishes Bertrand well. But that conversation between the sheets, in which the Duchesse proves a truly accomplished whore, though at the same time she is no longer completely able to address the youth as a whore (because her limited intellect has been steeped in the court seven years and taken on a good deal of pseudo-polish and etiquette)—that conversation does not succeed in changing Bertrand’s mind. He is beyond caring now. He will either go mad or run away. A dissection of the subconscious of the others would probably reveal that their awareness of the outside world, which awaits them with sentences in absentia, prison terms, and tribunals, is an invisible force spurring them to continue with the game; but Bertrand, who has nothing in common with such a past, has no wish to.

  Meanwhile, the conspiracy enters the phase of action: now not ten, but fourteen courtiers, ready for anything, having gained an accomplice in the captain of the palace guard, break into the royal bedroom after midnight. Their main objective is torpedoed at the culminating moment: it turns out that the good dollars have long since been spent, and all that remain, in the famous “second compartment of the trunk,” are the counterfeit. The King knew this well. Therefore there is really nothing to fight for, but they have burned their bridges: they must kill the King, who so far has only been watching from his bonds on the bed as they turn upside down the “treasury” hidden underneath it. They were going to have beaten him to death out of practical considerations, in order that he not be able to pursue them; now they kill him out of hatred, because he has enticed them with false treasure.

  Execrable as it sounds, I must say that the murder scene is marvelous; in the unerring strokes of the brush one recognizes the master. For in order to get at the old man as painfully as possible, before he is quite strangled with the cord, the conspirators begin to roar at him in the language of camp cooks and Gestapo chauffeurs, the language that had been anathematized, banished eternally from the kingdom. But then, as the body of the victim still is twitching on the floor (the brilliant motif of the towel!), the murderers, regaining their composure, return to the language of the court, indeed without design, it is only that they now have no alternative: the dollars are counterfeit, there is nothing with which to flee, nor any reason, Taudlitz has bound and tied them; though lifeless himself, he will let no one leave his State! They must consent, then, to the continuation of the game, in keeping with the motto “Le roi est mort, vive le roi!"—and there, at once, over the corpse, they must choose a new king.

  The next chapter (Bertrand in hiding at his “Duchesse’s”) is much weaker. But the final one, in which a patrol of mounted police comes knocking at the castle gate, that great, silent scene, the last in the novel, is a magnificent close. The drawbridge, the policemen in rumpled uniforms with Colts in shoulder holsters, wearing wide hats turned up on one side, and opposite them guards in half armor, with halberds, each side staring at the other in amazement, like two times, two worlds impossibly brought to a single place ... on either side of the portcullis, which slowly, heavily begins to lift, with an infernal grinding sound ... a finale worthy of the work! But unfortunately the author lost sight of his Hamlet, Bertrand; he did not make use of the tremendous opportunity that lay within that character. I will not say he should have had him killed off—Shakespeare’s play need not serve here as a paradigm—but it is a shame, this lost chance, this greatness oblivious of itself but present in the everyday, well-meaning heart of man. A shame.

  Rien du tout, ou la conséquence

  Solange Marriot

  (Editions du Midi, Paris)

  Nothing, or the Consequence is not only Mme Solange Marriot’s first book; it is also the first novel ever to have reached the limit of what writing can do. Not that it is a masterpiece of art; if I had to call it anything, I would call it a masterpiece of decency. The need for decency is the thorn in the side of all our literature today. Because our literature’s main malaise is the disgrace that one cannot be a writer and at the same time a man who is completely, that is, in full seriousness, decent. The initiation into the true essence of literature brings about a malaise quite similar to that which afflicts a sensitive child when it is for the first time informed of the facts of life. The child’s shock is a form of internal rebellion against the genital biology of our bodies, which seems to call for condemnation from the standpoint of good taste, and the shame and shock of the writer come from the realization of the inevitable lie that one commits in writing. There exist necessary lies, e.g., those that are morally defensible (thus the doctor lies to his terminally ill patient), but literary lies do not belong in this category. Someone has to be a doctor, consequently someone has to lie as a doctor, but no necessity brings the pen into proximity with the clean page. The past knew not this embarrassment, for it was not free; literature in an age of faith does not lie, it only serves. Its emancipation from what was necessary service gave rise to a crisis whose manifestations today are often pitiful, if not outright obscene.

  Pitiful, because a novel that depicts its own origination is half confession and half humbug. It, too, contains a residue, and even a good amount, of the lie. Sensing this, the next literati wrote gradually more and more about how one writes, to the detriment of the thing written, the story, and this method followed a falling curve down to works, finally, that were manifestoes of epic impotence. And so the novel invited us to step into its dressing room. But such invitations must always be suspect—if they do not actually amount to propositioning, then they turn out to be coquetry, and to flirt instead of lie—it is like going from the frying pan to the fire.

  The antinovel strove to become more radical; that is, it made every effort to demonstrate that it was no illusion of anything. While the “self-novel” was like a magician who reveals to the public all that he is holding up his sleeve, the antinovel was to become a pretense of nothing, not even of the self-unmasking magician. What then? It promised to communicate nothing, to tell of nothing, to signify not a thing, but merely to be, as a cloud is, a table, a tree. Fine in theory. It failed, however, because not everyone can be Lord God tout court, a creator of autonomous worlds, and a writer most certainly cannot. What decides the defeat is the issue of contexts: on them—on that which is completely inexpressible—depends the sense of what we say. The world of the Lord God has no contexts, hence it can be successfully replaced only by a world that is equally self-sufficient. You may stand on your head if you like, but it will never work—not in language.

  What then was left to literature after the fatal knowledge of its own indecency? The self-novel is a partial striptease; the antinovel, ipso facto, is (alas) a form of autocastration. Like the Skoptsi who, outraged in their moral conscience by their own genitality, performed upon themselves horrid operations, the antinovel has mutilated the unfortunate body of traditional literature. What then was left? Nothing except a romance with nothingness. For he who lies (and, as we know, a writer must lie) about nothing surely ceases to be a liar.

  It was necessary, then—and herein is the consequence—to write nothing. But can such a task make sense? To write nothing—is it not the same as to write nothing? What then?...

  Roland Barthes, the author of the now not-so-new essay “Le Degré zéro de l’écriture,” had not an inkling of this (but for all its famous wit, his is a shallow intellect). He did not comprehend that literature always is parasitic on the mind of the reader. Love, a tree, a park, a sigh, an earache—the reader understands, because the reader has experienced it. It is possible, of course, w
ith a book to rearrange the furniture inside a reader’s head, but only to the extent that there is some furniture there already, before the reading.

  He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation? The antinovel wished to pattern itself after mathematics; mathematics, surely, yields nothing real! Yes, but mathematics does not lie, for it does only what it must. It operates under the constraint of necessities that it does not invent on the spur of the moment; the method is given to it, which is why the discoveries of mathematicians are genuine, and why, too, their horror is genuine when the method leads them to a contradiction. The writer, because he does not operate under such necessity, because he is so free, can only enter into his quiet negotiations with the reader; he urges the reader kindly to assume ... to believe ... to accept as good coin ... but this is a game, and not the blessed bondage in which mathematics thrives. Total freedom is total paralysis in literature.

  Of what are we speaking? Of Mme Solange’s novel. Let us begin with the observation that this pretty name may be read variously, depending on the context in which it is placed. In French it can be Sun and Angel (Sol, Ange). In German it will be merely the name of an interval of time (so lange—so long). The absolute autonomy of language is arrant nonsense; humanists have believed in it out of naïveté—to which naïveté, however, the cybernetics people had no right. Machines to translate faithfully, indeed! No word, no whole sentence has meaning in itself, within its own trench and boundary. Borges came close to this state of affairs when, in his story “Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote,” he described a literary fanatic, the eccentric Menard, who after a great number of intellectual preparations wrote Don Quixote a second time, word for word, not copying down Cervantes but—as it were—immersing himself totally in the latter’s creative milieu. But the place in which Borges’s short story touches on the secret is this following passage: