A Perfect Vacuum

by Stanisław Lem

  “A comparison of the pages of Menard and Cervantes is highly revealing. The latter, for example, wrote (Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter XIX): ‘...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, the repository of deeds, the witness of the past, the pattern and the caution for the present day, and the lesson for future ages.’

  “This catalogue, published in the seventeenth century, penned by the ‘layman genius’ Cervantes, is simply a rhetorical encomium to history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: '...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, the repository of deeds, the witness of the past, the pattern and the caution for the present day, and the lesson for future ages.’

  “History as the mother of truth; the idea is extraordinary. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not characterize history as the study of reality but as its source. Historical truth, for him, is not that which has taken place; it is that which we believe has taken place. The concluding phrases—the pattern and the caution for the present day, the lesson for future ages—are unabashedly pragmatic.”

  This is something more than a literary joke and poking fun; it is the pure and simple truth, which the absurdity of the idea itself (to write Don Quixote a second time!) in no way lessens. For in fact what fills every sentence with meanings is the context of the given period; that which was “innocent rhetoric” in the seventeenth century is, in our age, truly cynical in its meanings. Sentences mean nothing in themselves; it was not Borges who jokingly decided thus; the moment in history shapes the meanings of language, such is the inalterable reality.

  And now, literature. Whatsoever it relates to us must prove a lie, not being the literal truth. Balzac’s Vautrin is as nonexistent as Faust’s devil. When it speaks the honest truth, literature ceases to be itself and becomes a diary, a news item, a denunciation, an appointment book, a letter, whatever you like, only not artistic writing.

  At this juncture appears Mme Solange with her Rien du tout, ou la conséquence. The title? Nothing, or the consequence? The consequence of what? Literature, obviously; for literature to be decent, that is, not to lie, is the same as for literature not to be. Only of this is it still possible today to write a decent book. The blush of indecency no longer works; it was good yesterday, but now we recognize it for what it is: a common pose, the trick of the experienced stripper who knows that her feigned modesty, her lowered lashes, her fake schoolgirl embarrassment as she removes her panties, excites the house even more!

  And so the theme has been defined. But how is one to write about nothing? It is necessary, yet impossible. By saying “nothing”? By repeating the word a thousand times? Or by beginning with the words “He was not born, consequently he was not named, either; on account of this he neither cheated in school nor later got mixed up in politics”? Such a work could have arisen, but it would have been a stunt and not a work of art, rather like those numerous books written in the second person singular; any of them can easily be booted out of such “originality” and forced to return to its proper place. All one need do is turn the second person back into the first. It does no violence whatever to the book; in no way does it change it. Similarly with our fictitious example: remove the negations, all those wearisome nots and nors that like a pseudo-nihilistic smallpox have bespotted the text, the text we invented extempore, and it becomes evident that here is yet another story, one of many, about the Marquise who left the house at five. To say she didn't leave—some revelation!

  Mme Solange was not taken in by this sort of trick. For she understood (she must have understood!) that one may indeed describe a particular story (a love story, say) with nonevents no worse than with events, but that the first device is merely an artifice. Instead of a print we obtain an exact negative, that is all. The nature of an innovation must be ontological, and not simply grammatical!

  When we say, “He was not named because he was not born,” we are, to be sure, moving beyond being, but only in that thinnest membrane of nonexistence that adheres tightly to reality. He was not born, although he could have been born, did not cheat, although he could have cheated. He could have done everything, had he been. The work will stand entirely on that “could have.” Out of such flour one cannot bake bread. One cannot go bounding from being to unbeing using such ploys. It is necessary, therefore, to leave the membrane of primitive denials, or of the negatives of actions, in order to plunge into nothingness, plunge deeply, hurling oneself headlong into it, but of course not blindly; to enminus nonbeing more and more powerfully—which must be a considerable labor, a great effort; and here is salvation for art, because what is involved is a full expedition into the abyss of ever more precise and ever greater Nothing, and therefore a process, whose dramatic peripeteia, whose struggle may be depicted—so long as it succeeds!

  The first sentence of Rien du tout, ou la conséquence reads, “The train did not arrive”; in the next sentence we find “He did not come.” We meet, then, with negations, but of what exactly? From the standpoint of logic these are total negations, since the text affirms absolutely nothing existentially; indeed, it confines itself exclusively to what did not occur.

  The reader, however, is a creature more frail than a perfect logician. So, although the text says nothing of this, there is conjured up involuntarily in his imagination a scene taking place at some railway station, a scene of waiting for someone who has not arrived, and since he knows the sex of the author (authoress), the waiting for the nonarrival immediately carries the anticipation of an erotic encounter. What of this? Everything! Because the whole responsibility for these conjectures, from the very first words, falls on the reader. With not a single word does the novel confirm his expectations; the novel is and remains decent in its method, I have heard some say that in places it is downright pornographic. Well, but there is not a single word in it that would assert sex in any form; and indeed, how could such an assertion be possible when it is expressly stated that in the home there is neither the Kamasutra nor any person’s reproductive organs (and those are denied most specifically! ).

  Nonbeing is already known to us in literature, but only as a certain Lack—of Something—for Someone. For example—of water, for one thirsty. The same applies to hunger (including the erotic), loneliness (the lack of others), etc. The exquisitely beautiful nonbeing of Paul Valéry is a lack of being that is bewitching for the poet; on such nothingnesses more than one poetic work has been built. But always it is exclusively a matter of Nothingness for Someone, or of nonbeing purely private, experienced on the individual level, therefore particular, chimerical, and not ontological (when I, thirsty, cannot have a drink of water, this does not mean, after all, the absence of water—as though water did not in general exist!). Such unobjective nothingness cannot be the theme of a radical work: Mme Solange understood this also.

  In the first chapter, following the nonarrival of the train and the nonappearance of the Someone, the narration, continuing in its subjectless way, reveals that it is not spring, or winter, or summer. The reader decides on autumn, but again only because that last climatic possibility has not been disavowed (it, too, will be, but later!). The reader therefore is constantly thrown back on himself, but that is the problem of his own anticipations, conjectures, his hypotheses ad hoc. In the novel there is not so much as a hint of these. The contemplation of the unbeloved heroine in nongravitational space (i.e., space in which there is no force of attraction), which concludes the first chapter, might seem, it is true, obscene—but, again, only to one who will think certain things himself, on his own. The work relates only what such an unbeloved would not be able to do, and not what she would be able to do, in particular positions. This second part, the suppositional, is again the personal contribution of the reader, his completely private gain (or loss, depending on how one looks at it). The work even goes so far as to stress that the unbeloved does not find herself in the presence of any kind of male. Anyway, the beginning of the next chapter discloses, straightaway, that this unbeloved is unbeloved for the
simple reason that she does not exist. An entirely logical situation—is it not?

  Then begins that drama of the diminution of space, of phallic-vaginal space also, which was not to the liking of a certain critic, a member of the Academy. The academician found it to be “an anatomical bore, if not a vulgarity.” He found it, let us note, on his own and by himself, because in the text we have only further, progressive denials, of a more and more general nature. If the lack of a vagina can still offend someone’s sensibilities, then we have gone far indeed. How can a thing be in bad taste which is not there at all?!

  Then the pit of nothingness, still shallow, begins to increase disquietingly. The middle of the book—from the fourth to the sixth chapter—is consciousness. Yes, its stream, but, as we begin to realize, this is not a stream of thoughts about nothing, old-fashioned, passé. This is a stream of no thoughts. The syntax itself remains intact, untouched, inviolate, and it carries us over the depths like a perilously buckling bridge. What a void ! But—we reason—even consciousness that is unthinking is still consciousness, is it not? Since that unthinkingness has limits ... but this is a delusion, for the limitations are created by the reader himself! The text does not think; it gives us nothing. On the contrary, it takes away in succession that which was still our property, and the emotions in reading it are precisely the result of the ruthlessness of such subtraction: horror vacui smites us, at the same time entices; the reading turns out to be not so much the destruction of the world of lies of the novel as a form of annihilation of the reader himself as a psychic being! A woman wrote this book? Difficult to believe, considering its merciless logic.

  In the last section of the work comes the doubt whether it can possibly continue: it has, after all, been saying nothing for so long! Any further progress to the center of nonexistence seems impossible. But no ! Again a trap, again an explosion—or, rather, an implosion, the caving in of yet another nothingness! The narrator—as we know, there is no narrator; he is replaced by the language, that which itself speaks by means of him, like an imaginary “it” (the “it” in “it is thundering” or “it is lightning”). In the next-to-last chapter we observe with dizziness that the negative absolute has now been reached. The business of the nonappearance of some man, by some train, the unbeing of the seasons of the year, of the weather, of the walls of the house, of the apartment, of the face, the eyes, the air, the bodies—all this lies far behind us, on the surface, the surface that, eaten away by our further progress, by that all-consuming cancerlike Nothing, has ceased to exist even as negation. We see how simple-minded, naïve, how positively comical it was of us to expect that we would he given facts of some sort here, that here something or other would happen!

  It is, therefore, a reduction, to zero only to begin with; later, sinking into the abyss with projections of negative transcendence, it is a reduction also of transcendental entities, since by now no metaphysical systems are possible, and the neantic center still looms before us. A vacuum, then, surrounds the narrative on every side; and behold, there are now its first incursions, intrusions, in the language itself. For the narrating voice begins to doubt itself. No, I put that poorly: “that which by itself tells of itself” collapses and vanishes somewhere; it already knows that it is not. If it still exists, it exists as a shadow, which is the simple lack of light; thus are these sentences the lack of existence. It is not the lack of water in the desert, not the maiden’s lack of a lover, it is the lack of self. Had this been a novel written in the classical, traditional fashion, it would have been easy for us to say what took place: the hero would have been the sort of someone who begins to harbor suspicions that he neither manifests himself nor dreams himself, but is dreamt and manifested—by someone, and through hidden intentional acts (as if he is appearing to someone in a dream and only thanks to the dreamer may exist provisionally). From this would have come the rushing fear that these acts would stop, and surely they could stop at any moment—whereupon he would then fade away!

  Thus it would have been in a more ordinary novel, but not with Mme Solange: the narrator cannot take fright of anything, because, you see, there is no narrator. What, then, occurs? The language itself begins to suspect, and then to understand, that there is no one besides itself, that, having meaning (to the extent that it has meaning) for anyone, for everyone, it thereby is not and never was or ever could have been a personal expression; cut off from all mouths at once, as a universally ejected tapeworm, as an adulterous parasite that has devoured its hosts, that has slain them so long ago that in it all memory of the crime, unknowingly committed, has been erased and obliterated, this language, like the skin of a balloon, till now'resilient, firm, from which invisibly and faster and faster the air escapes, begins to shrivel. This eclipse of speech, however, is not a babel; and it is not fear (again, only the reader fears, experiencing per procura, as it were, that alien, totally depersonalized torment) ; for a few pages yet, for a few moments, there remains the machinery of grammar, the millstones of the nouns, the cogwheels of syntax grinding out more and more slowly—yet precise to the last—nothingness, which corrodes them through; and that is how it ends, in mid-sentence, mid-word.... The novel does not end: it ceases. The language, at the start, sure of itself in the first pages, naïve, healthily-commonsensically believing in its own sovereignty, eroded by a silent undertow of treachery, or, rather, arriving at the truth of its external, illegitimate origins, of its corruption and abuse ( for this is the Last Judgment of literature), the language, having come to realize that it represents a form of incest—the incestuous union of nonbeing with being—suicidally disowns itself.

  A woman wrote this book? Extraordinary. It ought to have been written by some mathematician, but one only who with his mathematics proved—and cursed—literature.

  Pericalypsis

  Joachim F ersengeld

  (Editions de Minuit, Paris)

  Joachim F ersengeld, a German, wrote his Pericalypse in Dutch (he hardly knows the language, which he himself admits in the Introduction) and published it in France, a country notorious for its dreadful proofreading. The writer of these words also does not, strictly speaking, know Dutch, but going by the title of the book, the English Introduction, and a few understandable expressions here and there in the text, he has concluded that he can pass muster as a reviewer after all.

  Joachim F ersengeld does not wish to be an intellectual in an age when anyone can be one. Nor has he any desire to pass for a man of letters. Creative work of value is possible when there is resistance, either of the medium or of the people at whom the work is aimed; but since, after the collapse of the prohibitions of religion and the censor, one can say everything, or anything whatever, and since, with the disappearance of those attentive listeners who hung on every word, one can howl anything at anyone, literature and all its humanistic affinity is a corpse, whose advancing decay is stubbornly concealed by the next of kin. Therefore, one should seek out new terrains for creativity, those in which can be found a resistance that will lend an element of menace and risk—and therewith importance and responsibility—to the situation.

  Such a field, such an activity, can today be only prophecy. Because he is without hope—that is, because he knows in advance that he will be neither heard out nor recognized nor accepted—the prophet ought to reconcile himself a priori to a position of muteness. And he who, being a German, addresses Frenchmen in Dutch with English introductions is as mute as he who keeps silent. Thus F ersengeld acts in accordance with his own assumptions. Our mighty civilization, he says, strives for the production of commodities as impermanent as possible in packaging as permanent as possible. The impermanent product must soon be replaced by a new one, and this is good for the economy; the permanence of the packaging, on the other hand, makes its disposal difficult, and this promotes the further development of technology and organization. Thus the consumer copes with each consecutive article of junk on an individual basis, whereas for the removal of the packagings special antipollution programs
are required, sanitary engineering, the coordination of efforts, planning, purification and decontamination plants, and so on. Formerly, one could depend on it that the accumulation of garbage would be kept at a reasonable level by the forces of nature, such as the rains, the winds, rivers, and earthquakes. But at the present time what once washed and flushed away the garbage has itself become the excrement of civilization: the rivers poison us, the atmosphere burns our lungs and eyes, the winds strew industrial ashes on our heads, and as for plastic containers, since they are elastic, even earthquakes cannot deal with them. Thus the normal scenery today is civilizational droppings, and the natural reserves are a momentary exception to the rule. Against this landscape of packagings that have been sloughed off by their products, crowds bustle about, absorbed in the business of opening and consuming, and also in that last natural product, sex. Yet sex, too, has been given a multitude of packagings, for this and nothing else is what clothes are, displays, roses, lipsticks, and sundry other advertising wrappings. Thus civilization is worthy of admiration only in its separate fragments, much as the precision of the heart is worthy of admiration, the liver, the kidneys, or the lungs of an organism, since the rapid work of those organs makes good sense, though there is no sense whatever in the activity of the body that comprises these perfect parts—if it is the body of a lunatic.