A Perfect Vacuum

by Stanisław Lem

  The same process, declares the prophet, is taking place in the area of spiritual goods as well, since the monstrous machine of civilization, its screws having worked loose, has turned into a mechanical milker of the Muses. Thus it fills the libraries to bursting, inundates the bookstores and magazine stands, numbs the television screens, piling itself high with a superabundance of which the numerical magnitude alone is a deathblow. If finding forty grains of sand in the Sahara meant saving the world, they would not be found, any more than would the forty messianic books that have already long since been written but were lost beneath strata of trash. And these books have unquestionably been written; the statistics of intellectual labor guarantees it, as is explained—in Dutch—mathematically—by Joachim F ersengeld, which this reviewer must repeat on faith, conversant with neither the Dutch language nor the mathematical. And so, ere we can steep our souls in those revelations, we bury them in garbage, for there is four billion times more of the latter. But then, they are buried already. Already has come to pass what the prophecy proclaimed, only it went unnoticed in the general haste. The prophecy, then, is a retrophecy, and for this reason is entitled Pericalypse, and not Apocalypse. Its progress (retrogress) we detect by Signs: by languidity, insipidity, and insensitivity, and in addition by acceleration, inflation, and masturbation. Intellectual masturbation is the contenting of oneself with the promise in place of the delivery. first we were onanized thoroughly by advertising (that degenerate form of revelation which is the measure of the Commercial Idea, as opposed to the Personal), and then self-abuse took over as a method for the rest of the arts. And this, because to believe in the saving power of Merchandise yields greater results than to believe in the efficacy of the Lord God.

  The moderate growth of talent, its innately slow maturation, its careful weeding out, its natural selection in the purview of solicitous and discerning tastes—these are phenomena of a bygone age that died heirless. The last stimulus that still works is a mighty howl; but when more and more people howl, employing more and more powerful amplifiers, one’s eardrums will burst before the soul learns anything. The names of the geniuses of old, more and more vainly invoked, already are an empty sound; and so it is mene mene tekel upharsin, unless what Joachim F ersengeld recommends is done. There should be set up a Save the Human Race Foundation, as a sixteen-billion reserve on a gold standard, yielding an interest of four percent per annum. Out of this fund moneys should be dispensed to all creators—to inventors, scholars, engineers, painters, writers, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and designers—in the following way. He who writes nothing, designs nothing, paints nothing, neither patents nor proposes, is paid a stipend, for life, to the tune of thirty-six thousand dollars a year. He who does any of the afore-mentioned receives correspondingly less.

  Pericalypse contains a full set of tabulations of what is to be deducted for each form of creativity. For one invention or two published books a year, you receive not a cent; by three titles, what you create comes out of your own pocket. With this, only a true altruist, only an ascetic of the spirit, who loves his neighbor but not himself one bit, will create anything, and the production of mercenary rubbish will cease. Joachim F ersengeld speaks from personal experience, for it was at his own expense—at a loss!—that he published his Pericalypse. He knows, then, that total unprofitability does not at all mean the total elimination of creativity.

  Egoism manifests itself as a hunger for mammon combined with a hunger for glory: in order to scotch the latter as well, the Salvation Program introduces the complete anonymity of the creators. To forestall the submission of stipend applications from untalented persons, the Foundation will, through the appropriate organs, examine the qualifications of the candidates. The actual merit of the idea with which a candidate comes forward is of no consequence. The only important thing is whether the project possesses commercial value, that is, whether it can be sold. If so, the stipend is awarded immediately. For underground creative activity, there is set up a system of penalties and repressive measures within the framework of legal prosecution by the apparatus of the Safety Control; also introduced is a new form of police, namely, the Anvil (Anticreative Vigilance League). According to the penal code, whosoever clandestinely writes, disseminates, harbors, or even if only in silence publicly communicates any fruit of creative endeavor, with the purpose of deriving from said action either gain or glory, shall be punished by confinement, forced labor, and, in the case of recidivism, by imprisonment in a dark cell with a hard bed, and a caning on each anniversary of the offense. For the smuggling into the bosom of society of such ideas, whose tragic effect on life is comparable to the bane of the automobile, the scourge of cinematography, the curse of television, etc., the law provides capital punishment as the maximum and includes the pillory and a life sentence of the compulsory use of one’s own invention. Punishable also are attempted crimes, and premeditation carries with it badges of shame, in the form of the stamping of the forehead with indelible letters arranged to spell out “Enemy of Man.” However, graphomania, which does not look for gain, is called a Disorder of the Mind and is not punishable, though persons so afflicted are removed from society, as constituting a threat to the peace, and placed in special institutions, where they are humanely supplied with great quantities of ink and paper.

  Obviously world culture will not at all suffer from such state regulation, but will only then begin to flourish. Humanity will return to the magnificent works of its own history; for the number of sculptures, paintings, plays, novels, gadgets, and machines is great enough already to meet the needs of many centuries. Nor will anyone be forbidden to make so-called epochal discoveries, on the condition that he keep them to himself.

  Having in this way set the situation to rights—that is, having saved humanity—Joachim F ersengeld proceeds to the final problem: what is to be done with that monstrous glut which has already come about? As a man of uncommon civil fortitude, F ersengeld says that what has so far been created in the twentieth century, though it may contain great pearls of wisdom, is worth nothing when tallied up in its entirety, because you will not find those pearls in the ocean of garbage. Therefore he calls for the destruction of everything in one lump, all that has arisen in the form of films, illustrated magazines, postage stamps, musical scores, books, scientific articles, newspapers, for this act will be a true cleaning out of the Augean stables—with a full balancing of the historical credits and debits in the human ledger. (Among other things, the destruction will claim the facts about atomic energy, which will eliminate the current threat to the world.) Joachim F ersengeld points out that he is perfectly aware of the infamy of burning books, or even whole libraries. But the autos-da-fe enacted in history—such as in the Third Reich—were infamous because they were reactionary. It all depends on the grounds on which one does the burning. He proposes, then, a life-saving auto-da-fe, progressive, redemptive; and because Joachim F ersengeld is a prophet consistent to the end, in his closing word he bids the reader first tear up and set fire to this very prophecy!

  Idiota

  Gian Carlo Spallanzani

  (Mondadori Editore, Milan)

  The Italians, then, have a young writer of the type we have missed so, one who speaks with a full voice. And I feared the young would be infected by the cryptonihilism of the experts, who declare that all literature has “already been written,” and that now one can only glean scraps from the table of the old masters, scraps called myths or archetypes. These prophets of inventive barrenness (there is nothing new under the sun) preach their line not out of resignation, but as if the prospect of wide empty centuries awaiting Art in vain filled them with a sort of perverse satisfaction. For they hold against today’s world its technological ascent, and hope for evil, much as maiden aunts look forward with malicious glee to the wreck of a marriage foolishly entered into out of love. And so we now have jewelry engravers (for Italo Calvino is descended from Benvenuto Cellini, not from Michelangelo), and the naturalists who, ashamed of n
aturalism, pretend to be writing something other than what lies within their means (Alberto Moravia), but we have no men of mettle. They are hard to come by, now that anyone can play the rebel, provided his physiognomy supplies him with a fierce crop of beard.

  The young prose writer Gian Carlo Spallanzani is audacious to the point of impudence. He pretends to take the opinions of the experts as gospel, only later to sling mud at them. For his Idiot alludes to the novel of Dostoevsky not merely in its title: it reaches further. I do not know about others, but personally I find it easier to write about a book when I have seen the face of the author. Spallanzani is not prepossessing in his photo; he is an ungainly youth with a low forehead and puffy eyes, the small dark pupils of which are peevish, and the dainty chin makes one uneasy. An enfant terrible, a knave of low cunning and with a mean streak, an outspoken wolf in sheep’s clothing? I cannot find the right term, but I stick with my impression from the first reading of The Idiot: such perfidiousness is in a class by itself. Can he have written under a pseudonym? Because the great, historical Spallanzani was a vivisectionist, and this thirty-year-old is one also. I find it hard to believe that such a coincidence of names is completely accidental. The young author has cheek: he furnishes his Idiot with an introduction in which, with seeming candor, he tells why he abandoned his original idea—that of writing Crime and Punishment a second time, as “Sonya’s,” the story told in the first person by the daughter of Marmeladov.

  There is effrontery, not without its charm, in his explanation of how he restrained himself because he did not wish to do injury to the original. Albeit against his will—he would have had to (so he says) chip away at the statue that Dostoevsky raised up in honor of his shining prostitute. Sonya in Crime and Punishment appears intermittently, being a “third person”; a narrative in the first person would require her constant presence, even during her working hours, and that is the sort of work that affects the soul as no other. The axiom of her spiritual purity untouched by the experiences of the fallen body could not emerge whole. Defending himself in this devious way, the author does not ever address himself to the real question—of The Idiot. This already is double-dealing: he accomplished what he wanted, for he has shown us the general drift; his impudence lies in his having made no mention of the necessity, of the imperative, that compelled him to take up a theme after Dostoevsky !

  The story, realistic, matter-of-fact, at first seems set on a rather prosaic level. A very ordinary, moderately well-to-do family, an average, respectable couple—upright, but uninspired—has a mentally retarded child. Like any child, it showed delightful promise; its first words, those unintentionally original expressions which are the side effects of one’s growing into speech, have been preserved with loving care in the reliquary of the parents’ reminiscences. Those blissful, diapered simplicities, in the framework of the present nightmare, mark out the amplitude between what could have been and what has happened.

  The child is an idiot. Living with him, caring for him, is an anguish all the more cruel in that it has grown out of love. The father is almost twenty years older than the mother; there are couples who in a similar situation would try again; here it is not known what hinders such an act, physiology or psychology. But for all that, it is probably love. Under normal circumstances the love could never have undergone such magnification. Precisely because he is an idiot, the child makes prodigies of his parents. He improves them to the very degree to which he lacks normality. This could be the sense of the novel, its theme, but it is merely the premise.

  In their contacts with the outside world, with relatives, doctors, lawyers, the father and mother are ordinary people, deeply troubled but restrained, for indeed this situation has been going on for years: there has been sufficient time to acquire self-control! The period of despair, of hope, of trips to various capitals, to the finest specialists, has long since passed. The parents realize that nothing can be done. They have no illusions. Their visits to the doctor, to the attorney, are now to ensure some decent, endurable modus vivendi for the idiot when his natural protectors are gone. They must see to a will, safeguard the inheritance. This is done slowly, soberly, with due deliberation. Tedious and scrupulous: nothing more natural under the sun. When they return home, however, and when the three are by themselves, the situation changes in a flash. I would say: as when actors make their entrance on stage. Fine, but we do not know where the stage is. This is now to be revealed. Without ever making any arrangement between themselves, without ever exchanging so much as a single word—that would be a psychological impossibility—the parents have created, over the years, a system of interpreting the actions of the idiot in such a way as to find them intelligent, in every instance and in every respect.

  Spallanzani found the germ of such conduct in normal behavior. It is known, surely, that the circle of those who dote upon a small child emerging from the infant state makes as much as it can of the child’s responses and words. To its mindless echolalia are attributed meanings; in its incoherent babbling is discovered intelligence, even wit; the inaccessibility of the child’s psyche allows the observer enormous freedom, especially the doting observer. It must have been in this way that the rationalization of the idiot’s actions first began. No doubt the father and mother vied with each other in finding signs to indicate that their child was speaking better and better, more and more clearly, that he was doing better all the time, positively radiating good nature and affection. I have been saying “child,” but when the scene opens he is already a fourteen-year-old boy. What sort of system of misinterpretation must it be, what subterfuges, what explanations—frantic to the point of being outright comical—must be called into play to save the fiction, when the reality so unremittingly contradicts it? Well, all this can be done, and of such acts consists the parental sacrifice in behalf of the idiot.

  Their isolation must be complete. The world has nothing to offer him and will not help him; it is of no use to him, therefore —yes, the world to him, not he to the world. The sole interpreters of his behavior must be the initiated, the father and mother: in this way, everything can be transformed. We do not learn whether the idiot killed, or put out of her misery, his ailing grandmother; one can, however, set out side by side the different points of circumstantial evidence. His grandmother did not believe in him (that is, in that version of him which the parents had established—true, we cannot know how much of her “unbelief” the idiot was able to sense); she had asthma; her wheezing and rattling during the attacks were not shut out even by the felt-padded door; he could not sleep when the attacks intensified; they drove him into a rage; he was found sleeping peacefully in the room of the dead woman, at the foot of her bed, on which her body had already grown cold.

  First he is carried to the nursery, and only then does the father attend to his own mother. Did the father suspect something? This we never know. The parents do not refer to the topic, for certain things are done without being named; as if they realize that any improvisation has its limits, when irrevocably now they must set about doing “those things,” they sing. They do what is indispensable, but at the same time conduct themselves like Mommy and Daddy, singing lullabies if it is evening, or the old songs of their childhood if intervention becomes necessary during the day. Song has proved a better extinguisher of the intellect than silence. We hear it at the very beginning; that is, the servants hear it, the gardener. “A sad song,” he says, but later we begin to guess what gruesome work was likely done to the accompaniment of precisely that song: it was early morning when the body was found. What an infernal refinement of feelings!

  The idiot behaves dreadfully, with an inventiveness sometimes characteristic of a profound dementia that is capable of cunning; in this way he spurs his parents on ever more, for they must find themselves equal to every task. Now and then their words are fitted exactly to their actions, but that is rare; the eeriest effects of all occur when they say one thing while doing another, for here one type of resourcefulness, the cretinoi
d, is pitted against another, a devotedly ministering resourcefulness—loving, giving—and only the distance that perforce separates the two turns these acts of sacrifice into the macabre. But the parents by now probably do not see this: it has, after all, gone on for years! In the face of each new surprise (a euphemism: the idiot spares them nothing), there is first a fraction of a second in which, along with them, we experience a thrill of fear, a piercing dread that this will not only shatter the present moment but will overturn, in a single blow, the entire edifice that has been raised with tender care by the father and mother in the course of long months and years.

  We are wrong; an exchange of glances, purely reflexive, a few laconic remarks to shift gears, and in the tone of a natural conversation begins the lifting of this new burden, the fitting of it into the created structure. An eerie humor and an arresting nobility are in such scenes, thanks to the psychological accuracy. The words they venture to use when it is no longer possible not to put on the “little smock”! When they do not know what to do with the razor; or when the mother, jumping from the tub, must barricade herself in the bathroom, and later, having made a short circuit in the entire house, so that darkness descends, by feel removes the barricade of furniture, since its presence is—to her version of the child, which binds her—more damaging than a defect in the electrical installation. In the vestibule, dripping wet and wrapped in a thick rug, no doubt on account of the razor, she waits for the father to come home. It sounds coarse and awkward—worse, unbelievable—summarized like this, taken out of context. The parents act in the knowledge that to reconcile such incidents to the norm, through completely arbitrary interpretations, is an impossibility; therefore it was a little at a time, themselves not knowing when, that they passed beyond the boundary of that norm and entered a realm inaccessible to ordinary office or kitchen mortals. Not in the direction of madness, not at all: it is not true that everyone can go insane. But everyone can believe. To keep from becoming a family defiled, they became a family sacred.