A Perfect Vacuum

by Stanisław Lem

  That word does not appear in the book; nor is the idiot, according to the faith of the parents (for faith it must be called), either God or a lesser deity; he is merely other than all creatures, a thing unto himself, unlike any child or youth; and in that otherness he is theirs, irrevocably loved, their one and only. Farfetched? Then read The Idiot yourself; you will see that faith is not merely a metaphysical capacity of the mind. The situation is in all its substance so constantly rooted in harshness that only the absurdity of faith can save it from damnation, which here means: from psychopathological nomenclature. If the saints of the Lord have been taken by psychiatrists for paranoiacs, then why can it not also be the other way around? Idiot? The word does make its appearance in the action, but only when the parents go among other people. They speak of the child in the language of those others, of the doctors, attorneys, relatives, but for themselves they know better. Thus they lie to others because their faith has not the mark of a mission, and therefore not the aggressiveness that demands the conversion of the heathen. The father and mother are, anyway, too level-headed to believe for even a second in the possibility of such conversion: it does not concern them, and besides, it is not the whole world that needs saving, but only three people. While they live, they have their mutual church. It is not a matter of shame or of prestige, or of the insanity of an aging couple, called folie a deux, but merely an earthly, transitory thing, taking place in a house with central heating; it is the triumph of love, whose motto reads Credo quia absurdum est. If this be madness, every faith can be reduced to that level.

  Spallanzani walks a narrow line throughout, for the greatest danger for the novel was to become a caricature of the Holy Family. The father is old? Then that is Joseph. The mother is much younger? Mary. And in that case the child ... Well, I think that if Dostoevsky had not written his Idiot, this line of allegorization never would have presented itself, or would have remained so veiled as to be hardly noticeable, and only to a few. If one can put it thus, Spallanzani has absolutely nothing against the Gospel; nor has he the least desire to make free with the Holy Family; and if, in spite of everything, there does arise—one cannot altogether avoid it—precisely such a connotative ricochet, then the “blame” must be borne entirely by Dostoevsky and his Idiot. Yes, of course: to this end alone was the demolition charge of the work primed and set, as an attack leveled at the great writer! Prince Myshkin, the saintly epileptic, the misunderstood innocent-ascetic, the Jesus with the stigmata of grand mal—he serves here as a link, a relay point. Spallanzani’s idiot resembles him at times, but with the signs reversed! This is, you might say, the maniac variant, and exactly thus might one picture the adolescence of the pale youth Myshkin, when the epileptic seizures, with their mystic aura, with their bestial spasms, for the first time knock to pieces the image of angelic little-darlingness. The tyke is a cretin? Incessantly, yes, yet we get the communion of his vacant mind with sublimity, as when, suffocated by the music, he smashes the phonograph record, wounding himself, and tries to devour it along with his own blood. Well, you see, this is a form of—an attempt at-—transubstantiation: something of Bach must have knocked upon the door of his dim consciousness, if he sought to make it a part of himself—by eating it.

  Had the parents turned the whole thing over to the institutional Lord God, or had they simply created a three-person substitute for religion, a kind of sect with a mentally deficient stand-in for God, their defeat would have been certain. But not for a moment do they cease to be ordinary, literal, maltreated parents; they never even considered the way of holy ambitions—they permitted themselves none, nothing that was not of immediate, on-the-spot necessity. Therefore, they did not actually build any system at all; instead, through the situation, a system was born and revealed itself to them, not wanted, not planned, not even suspected. They received no revelation; they were themselves in the beginning, and themselves they remained. And so it is only an earthly love. We have grown unaccustomed to its power in literature, a literature which, schooled in cynicism, its old romantic back broken by the blows of psychoanalytic doctrines, has become blind to that part of the amplitude of human destiny on which thrived—and which cultivated for us—the classics of the past.

  A cruel novel: it tells, first, of the boundless talent for compensation, and so of the creativity that resides in everyone, anyone, no matter who he is, if fate afflicts him with the torment of an appropriate labor. And then it tells of the forms in which love manifests itself when stripped of hope, when brought to the depths of despair, yet never relinquishing its object. In this context the words Credo quia absurdum are the worldly equivalent of the words Finis vitae, sed non amoris. The novel is about (this is already the anthropological exegesis, and not the tragedy of a father and a mother) how there comes into being, in microscopic mechanisms, a world-creating intentionality that names, and therefore it is not simply transcendence. No, the idea is that the world, while undisturbed in its arbitrarily violent shame and ugliness, can be altered—or what is conveyed by the words “transformed,” “transfigured.” Were we not able to reshape the monstrous into the correlates of the angelic, we could not endure, and this is what this book is all about. A faith in transcendence may be completely unnecessary; and without it, one can attain the grace (or the agony) of a theodicy, for it is not in the recognition of the state of things but in their alterability that the freedom of man lives. If this freedom is not a true freedom (indeed, involved is an utter subjugation—by love!), then there can be no other. Spallanzani’s The Idiot is not the androgynous allegory of the Christian myth, but an atheistic heterodoxy.

  Spallanzani, like a psychologist performing experiments on rats, subjected his heroes to a test that was designed to prove his anthropological hypothesis. At the same time, the book is a broadside against Dostoevsky, as if the latter were living and writing today. Spallanzani wrote his Idiot in order to demonstrate to Dostoevsky a weak heresy. I cannot say that the assault succeeds, but I understand the intent: to break out of that magic circle of issues and ideas in which the great Russian writer confined his own and the following age. Art cannot look only backward, or content itself with tightrope walking; new eyes are needed, new ways of seeing, and most of all a new idea. Let us keep in mind that this is a first book. I await Spallanzani’s next novel as I have not awaited any in a long time.

  U-Write-It

  A book that told the story of the rise and fall of U-Write-It would make most instructive reading. That neoplasm of the publishing world became the subject of such heated debate that the debate obscured the phenomenon itself. Therefore the factors that led to the failure of the enterprise to this day remain unclear. No one made an attempt to carry out public-opinion research in this regard. Perhaps rightly so; perhaps the public that decided the fate of the venture did not itself know what it was doing.

  The invention had been in the air a good twenty years, and one can only wonder that it was not implemented earlier. I recall the first model of that “literary erector set.” It was a box in the shape of a thick book, containing directions, a prospectus, and a kit of “building elements.” These elements were strips of paper of unequal width, printed with fragments of prose. Each strip had holes punched along the margin to facilitate binding, and several numerals stamped in different colors. Arranging the strips according to the numbering of the base color, black, one obtained the “starting text,” which consisted usually of at least two works of world literature, suitably abridged. Had the set been made only for the purpose of such reconstruction, it would have been devoid of sense and commercial value. This lay in the possibility of shuffling the elements. The instructions usually supplied several illustrative variants of recombination, and the colored numerals in the margins referred to these. The idea was patented by Universal, who used books to which all authors’ rights had expired. Such were the works of the greats, of Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, duly abridged by the publisher’s anonymous staff. Without fail the inventors directed this concoction at
a certain class of people, one that could derive enjoyment from the deformation and distortion of masterpieces (or, rather, of crude versions of them). You take Crime and Punishment in hand, or War and Peace, and do whatever you please with the characters. Natasha can go astray before the wedding and after it, too; Svidrigailov can marry Raskolnikov’s sister, and Raskolnikov can escape justice and go off with Sonya to Switzerland; Anna Karenina will betray her husband not with Vronsky, but with the footman, etc. In one voice the critics attacked such desecration; the publisher defended himself as best he could, and fairly adroitly at that.

  The instructions that came with the set claimed that in this way one could learn the rules of literary composition (“Perfect for beginning writers!”), and one could also use the set as a text for psychological projection (“Tell me what you have done with Anne of Green Gables and I will tell you who you are”). In a word—a training device for literary hopefuls and an amusement for every literary amateur.

  It was not hard to see that the publishers were guided by less-than-honorable intentions. In their instructions, World Books cautioned the buyer against the use of “improper” combinations, meaning the rearrangement of passages in the text so as to impart a contrary sense to scenes originally pure as the driven snow: by the insertion of a single sentence, an innocent conversation between two women took on Lesbian overtones; it was also possible, in the worthy families of Dickens, to have incest practiced—whatever your heart desired. The caution was, of course, an incitement, worded in such a way that no one could accuse the publisher of offending against decency. Well, if he clearly said in the instructions that this should not be done...

  Infuriated by helplessness (on legal grounds the thing was not open to attack; the publishers had seen to that), the well-known critic Ralph Summers wrote at the time: “And so modern pornography is no longer enough. It is necessary in analogous fashion to besmirch everything that arose in the past, that which was not only without obscene intent but actually in opposition to it. This paltry surrogate for the Black Mass, which anyone can conduct in the seclusion of his home, for four dollars, on the defenseless body of the murdered classics, is a true disgrace.”

  It soon turned out that Summers had exaggerated in his Cassandra-like pronouncement: the venture did not prosper half so well as the publishers had expected. Before long they came up with a new version of the “erector set,” a volume composed entirely of empty sheets on which one could arrange by hand the strips with the texts, since both the strips and the pages of the volume were coated with a monomolecular magnetic foil. Thereby the “binding” work was greatly simplified. But this innovation did not catch on, either. Could it be, as some idealists (very rare nowadays) surmised, that the public was refusing to participate in “the abusing of the great works”? To presume an attitude so high-minded is, in my opinion, alas, unwarranted. The quiet hope of the publishers had been that a considerable number of people would develop a taste for the new game. Certain passages of the instructions give an indication of this line of thought: “U-Write-lt allows you to acquire that same power over human lives, godlike, which till now has been the exclusive privilege of the world’s greatest geniuses!” Which Ralph Summers, in one of his diatribes, interpreted as follows: “Singlehanded you can drag down any loftiness, sully all that is clean, and your efforts will be accompanied by the pleasant awareness that you are not now obliged to sit and listen to what some Tolstoy, what some Balzac had to say, because in this you are boss and call the shots!”

  And yet there were surprisingly few who wanted to be such “defilers.” Summers foresaw the spread of “a new sadism, taking the form of aggression against the permanent values of our culture,” but meanwhile U-Write-It was barely selling. It would be nice to believe that the public was prompted by “that natural grain of sense and rectitude which subcultural convulsions have succeeded in obscuring from our view” (L. Evans in the Christian Science Monitor). This writer does not share—much as he would like to!—Evans’s opinion.

  What, then, took place? Something a great deal simpler, I daresay. For Summers and Evans, for me, for a few hundred critics tucked away among university quarterlies, and in addition for another several thousand eggheads throughout the land, Svidrigailov, Vronsky, Sonya Marmeladov, or for that matter Vautrin, Anne of Green Gables, Rastignac, are characters extremely well known, familiar, close, sometimes actually more vivid than many real acquaintances. But for the public at large they are empty sounds, names without content. Thus for Summers and Evans, for me, the union of Svidrigailov with Natasha would be a horrendous thing, but for the public it would mean no more or less than the marriage of Mr. X and Mrs. Y. Because for the public at large they have no fixed symbolic value—be it that of nobility of feeling or dissolute wickedness—such characters do not offer a perverse or any other type of entertainment. They are completely neutral. Of no concern to anyone. The publishers, cynical as they were, did not divine this, not being truly attuned to the situation in the literary market place. If a man finds enormous value in a particular book, then the use of that book as a doormat for the wiping of shoes will seem to him an act not just of vandalism, but of the “Black Mass”—which is precisely what Summers thought, for that is how he wrote.

  The growing indifference in our world to such cultural values had progressed a good deal beyond what the authors of the enterprise imagined. No one cared to play U-Write-It, not because he nobly forbore to pervert quality, but for the simple reason that between the book of a fourth-rate hack and the epic of Tolstoy he saw no difference whatever. The one left him as cold as the other. Even if there was in the public “the desire to trample,” there was—from its point of view—nothing interesting to trample.

  Did the publishers grasp this particular lesson? Yes, in a sense. I doubt that they became aware of the state of affairs in so many words, but, led by instinct, intuition, by their noses, they all the same began to put on the market variants of the “erector set” that did much better, since these permitted the assembling of purely pornographic and obscene compositions. The last diehard esthetes heaved a sigh of relief, since at least now the venerable remains of the masterpieces would be left alone. Immediately the problem ceased to interest them, and from the pages of the élite literary quarterlies there disappeared those articles in which robes were rent and (egg)heads heaped with ashes. Because what happens in the nonélite circles of readers does not, not one bit, concern the Olympus of the arts and its Zeuses.

  That Olympus was roused a second time, when Bernard de la Taille, having constructed from The Big Party—a set translated into French—a novel, received for it the Prix Femina. This led to a scandal, because the shrewd Frenchman had neglected to inform the judges that his novel was not entirely original but represented the product of an assembly. De la Taille’s novel ( War in the Dark) is not without merit; its construction called for both talents and interests normally not found in the buyers of V-Write-It sets. But this isolated incident changed nothing; from the start it was clear that the venture would oscillate between a stupid joke and commercial pornography. No one struck it rich with U-Write-It. The esthetes, schooled in minimalism, today are glad that characters out of gutter romances no longer trespass on the parquets of Tolstoyan salons, and that virtuous maidens like Raskolnikov’s sister no longer have to let themselves go with ruffians and degenerates.

  In England a farcical version of U-Write-It still ekes out an existence; there they publish sets that enable one to build brief texts on the principle of “fun”; the home-grown litterateur is tickled that in his micro-short story the whole company is poured into the bottle instead of the juice, that Sir Galahad ogles his own horse, that during Mass the priest sets off electric trains on the altar, etc. This evidently amuses the English, since a few of their newspapers even run a regular column for such lucubrations. On the Continent, however, U-Write-It has to all intents and purposes been discontinued. If we may cite a certain Swiss critic who has interpreted the failure of that
business venture differently from us: “The public,” he says, “is grown too lazy to want even to rape, undress, or torture anyone itself. All that is now done for it by professionals. U-Write-It might possibly have been a success had it appeared sixty years earlier. Conceived too late, it was stillborn.” What is there to add to this statement—but a heavy sigh?

  Odysseus of Ithaca

  Kuno Mlatje

  The full name of the hero of this novel (written by an American) runs Homer Maria Odysseus; Ithaca, where he came into the world, is a jerkwater town of four thousand in the state of Massachusetts. Nonetheless the issue is the quest of Odysseus of Ithaca, a quest not without deeper meaning and thereby linked to its august prototype. True, the beginning does not seem to promise this. Homer M. Odysseus is hauled into court for setting fire to a car belonging to Professor E. G. Hutchinson of the Rockefeller Foundation. The reasons for which he had to set fire to the car he will reveal only on condition that the Professor appear personally in the courtroom. When this takes place, Odysseus, making as if to whisper something of tremendous importance to the Professor, bites him in the ear. All hell breaks loose; the counsel for the defense demands a psychiatric examination; the judge wavers; meanwhile Odysseus, from the dock, delivers a speech in which he explains that he had had Herostrates in mind, for cars are the temples of our time, and he bit the Professor in the ear because Stavrogin did this and became famous by it. He, too, requires notoriety, and this for the money it carries with it. The money will enable him to finance a project he has hammered out for the good of humanity.