Microworlds

by Stanisław Lem

  Dick, on the other hand, by introducing into the annihilation ploy — the tempo of which becomes more violent as the action progresses — instruments of civilization such as hallucinogens, effects such a commingling of the convulsions of technology with those of human experience that it is no longer apparent just what works the terrible wonders -a deus ex machina or a machina ex deo, historical accident or historical necessity. It is difficult to elucidate Dick’s position in this regard, because in particular novels he has given mutually incongruent answers to this question. Appeal to transcendence appears now as a mere possibility for the reader’s conjectures, now as a diagnostic near-certainty. In Ubik, as we have said, a conjectural solution which refuses to explain events in terms of some version of occultism or spiritualism finds support in the bizarre technology of half-life as the last chance offered by medicine to people on the point of death. But earlier, in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, transcendental evil emanates from the titular hero — that is, by the way, rather low-grade metaphysics, being akin to hack treatments of “supernatural visitations” and “ghosts,” and all that saves the thing from turning into a fiasco is the author’s virtuosity as a storyteller. And in Galactic Pot-Healer we have to do with a fabulous parable about a sunken cathedral on some planet and about the struggle that takes place between Light and Darkness over raising it, so that the last semblance of literalness of events vanishes here. Dick is, so I instinctively judge, perfidious in that he does not give unambiguous answers to the questions provoked by reading him, in that he strikes no balances and explains nothing “scientifically,” but instead just confounds things, not only in the plot itself but also with respect to a superordinated category: the literary convention within which the story unfolds. For all that Galactic Pot-Healer leans toward allegory, it does not adopt this position either unambiguously or definitively, and a like indeterminacy as to genre is also characteristic of other novels by Dick, perhaps to an even higher degree. We thus encounter here the same difficulty about genre placement of a work that we met with in the writing of Kafka.

  It should be emphasized that the genre affiliation of a creative work is not an abstract problem of interest only to theorists of literature. It is an indispensable prerequisite to the reading of a work. The difference between the theorist and the ordinary reader reduces itself to the fact that the latter places the book he has read in a specific genre automatically, under the influence of his internalized experiences — in the same way that we employ our native language automatically, even when we do not know its morphology or syntax from specialized studies. The convention proper to a concrete genre becomes fixed with the passage of time and is familiar to every qualified reader; consequently, “everybody knows” that in a realistic novel the author cannot cause his hero to walk through closed doors, but can on the other hand reveal to the reader the content of a dream the hero has and forgets before he wakes up (although the one thing is as impossible as the other from a common-sense point of view). The convention of the detective story requires that the perpetrator of a crime be found out, while the convention of science fiction requires rational accounting for events that are quite improbable and even seemingly at odds with logic and experience. On the other hand, the evolution of literary genres is based precisely on violation of storytelling conventions which have already become static. So Dick’s novels in some measure violate the convention of science fiction, which can be accounted to him as merit, because they thereby acquire broadened meanings having allegorical import. This import cannot be exactly determined; the indefiniteness that originates from this favors the emergence of an aura of enigmatic mystery about the work. What is involved is a modern authorial strategy, which some people may find intolerable, but which cannot be assailed with factual arguments, since the demand for absolute purity of genres is becoming nowadays an anachronism in literature. The critics and readers who hold Dick’s “impurity” with respect to genre against him are fossilized traditionalists, and a counterpart to their attitude would be an insistence that prosaists should keep on writing in the manner of Zola and Balzac, and only thus. In the light of the foregoing observations one can understand better the peculiarity and uniqueness of the place occupied by Dick in science fiction. His novels throw many readers accustomed to standard science fiction into abiding confusion, and give rise to complaints, as naïve as they are wrathful, that Dick, instead of providing “precise explanations” by way of conclusion, instead of solving puzzles, sweeps things under the rug. In relation to Kafka, analogous objections would consist in demanding that The Metamorphosis should conclude with an explicit “entomological justification,” making plain when and under what circumstances a normal man can turn into a bug, and that The Trial should explain just what Mr. K. is accused of.

  Philip Dick does not lead his critics an easy life, since he does not so much play the part of a guide through his fantasmagoric worlds as he gives the impression of one lost in their labyrinth. He has stood all the more in need of critical assistance, but has not received it, and has gone on writing while labeled a “mystic” and thrown back entirely on his own resources. There is no telling whether or how his work would have changed if it had come under the scrutinies of genuine critics. Perhaps such change would not have been all that much to the good. A second characteristic trait of Dick’s work, after its ambiguity as to genre, is its tawdriness, which is not without a certain charm, being reminiscent of the goods offered at county fairs by primitive craftsmen who are at once clever and naïve, possessed of more talent than self-knowledge. Dick has as a rule taken over a rubble of building materials from the run-of-the-mill American professionals of science fiction, frequently adding a true gleam of originality to already worn-out concepts and, what is surely more important, erecting with such material constructions truly his own. The world gone mad, with a spasmodic flow of time and a network of causes and effects that wriggles as if nauseated, the world of frenzied physics, is unquestionably his invention, being an inversion of our familiar standard according to which only we, but never our environment, may fall victim to psychosis. Ordinarily, the heroes of science fiction are overtaken by only two kinds of calamities: the social, such as the “infernos of police-state tyranny,” and the physical, such as catastrophes caused by nature. Evil is thus inflicted on people either by other people (invaders from the stars are merely people in monstrous disguises) or by the blind forces of matter.

  With Dick the very basis of such a clear-cut articulation of the proposed diagnosis comes to grief. We can convince ourselves of this by putting to Ubik questions of the order just noted. Who was responsible for the strange and terrible things that happened to Runciter’s people? The bomb attack on the moon was the doing of a competitor, but of course it was not in his power to bring about the collapse of time. An explanation appealing to the medical cold-pac technology is, as we have pointed out, likewise incapable of rationalizing everything. The gaps that separate the fragments of the plot cannot be eliminated, and they lead one to suspect the existence of some higher-order necessity, which constitutes the destiny of Dick’s world. Whether this destiny resides in the temporal sphere or beyond it is impossible to say. When one considers to what an extent our faith in the infallible beneficence of technical progress has already waned, the fusion Dick envisages between culture and nature, between the instrument and its basis, by virtue of which it acquires the aggressive character of a malignant neoplasm, no longer seems merely sheer fantasy. This is not to say that Dick is predicting any concrete future. The disintegrating worlds of his stories — inversions, as it were, of Genesis, order returning to chaos — are not so much the future foreseen, as future shock, not straightforwardly expressed but embodied in fictional reality; an objectivized projection of the fears and fascinations proper to the human individual in our times.

  It has been customary to identify the downfall of civilization falsely and narrowly with regression to some past stage of history — even to the caveman or downright
animal stage. Such an evasion is often employed in science fiction, since inadequacy of imagination takes refuge in oversimplified pessimism. Then we are shown the remotest future as a lingering state of feudal, tribal, or slaveholding society, inasmuch as atomic war or invasion from the stars is supposed to have hurled humanity backward, even into the depths of a prehistoric way of life. To say of such works that they advocate the concepts of some cyclic (e.g., Spenglerian) philosophy of history would amount to maintaining that a motif endlessly repeated by a phonograph record represents the concept of some sort of “cyclic music,” whereas it is merely a matter of a mechanical defect resulting from a blunt needle and worn grooves. So works of this sort do not pay homage to cyclic historiosophy, but merely reveal an insufficiency of sociological imagination, for which the atomic war or the interstellar invasion is only a convenient pretext for spinning out interminable sagas of primordial tribal life under the pretense of portraying the farthest future. Nor is it possible to hold that such books promulgate the “atomic credo” of belief in the inevitability of a catastrophe that will soon shatter our civilization, since the cataclysm in question amounts to nothing but an excuse for shirking more important creative obligations.

  Such expedients are foreign to Dick. For him, the development of civilization continues, but is, as it were, crushed by itself, becoming monstrous at the heights of its achievement — which, as a prognostic viewpoint, is more original than the assuredly unilluminating thesis that, if technical civilization breaks down, people will be forced to get along by returning to primitive tools, even to bludgeons and flints.

  Alarm at the impetus of civilization finds expression nowadays in the slogans of a “return to nature” after smashing and discarding everything “artificial,” i.e., science and technology. These pipe dreams turn up also in science fiction. Happily for us, they are absent in Dick. The action of his novels takes place in a time when there can no longer be any talk of returning to nature or of turning away from the “artificial,” since the fusion of the natural with the artificial has long since become an accomplished fact.

  At this point it may be worthwhile to point out the dilemma encountered by futuristically oriented science fiction. According to an opinion quite generally held by readers, science fiction ought to depict the world of the fictional future no less explicitly and intelligibly than a writer such as Balzac depicted the world of his own time in The Human Comedy. Whoever asserts this fails to take into account the fact that there exists no world beyond or above history and common to all eras or all cultural formations of mankind. That which, like the world of The Human Comedy, strikes us as completely clear and intelligible is not an altogether objective reality, but is only a particular interpretation (of nineteenth-century vintage and hence close to us) of a world classified, understood, and experienced in a concrete fashion. The familiarity of Balzac’s world thus signifies nothing more than the simple fact that we have grown perfectly accustomed to this account of reality and that consequently the language of Balzac’s characters, their culture, their habits and ways of satisfying spiritual and bodily needs, and also their attitude toward nature and transcendence seem to us transparent. However, the movement of historical changes may infuse new content into concepts thought of as fundamental and fixed, as for example the notion of “progress,” which according to nineteenth-century attitudes was equivalent to a confident optimism, convinced of the existence of an inviolable boundary separating what is harmful to man from what benefits him. Currently we begin to suspect that the concept thus established is losing its relevance, because the harmful ricochets of progress are not incidental, easily eliminated, adventitious components of it, but are, rather, gains achieved at such cost as, at some point along the way, to liquidate all the gain. In short, absolutizing the drive toward “progress” could prove to be a drive toward ruin.

  So the image of the future world cannot be limited to adding a certain number of technical innovations, and meaningful prediction does not lie in serving up the present larded with startling improvements or revelations in lieu of the future.

  The difficulties encountered by the reader of a work placed in a remote historical period are not the result of any arbitrariness on the writer’s part, any predilection for “estrangements,” any wish to shock the reader or to lead him up the garden path, but are an ineradicable part of such an artistic undertaking. Situations and concepts can be understood only through relating them to ones already known, but when too great a time interval separates people living in different eras there is a loss of the basis for understanding in common life experiences, which we unreflectingly and automatically imagine to be invariant. It follows that an author who truly succeeded in delineating an image of the far future would not achieve literary success, since he would assuredly not be understood. Consequently, in Dick’s stories a truth value can be ascribed only to their generalized basis, which can be summed up more or less as follows: when people become ants in the labyrinths of the technosphere they themselves have built, the idea of a return to nature not only becomes Utopian but cannot even be meaningfully articulated, because no such thing as a nature that has not been artificially transformed has existed for ages. We today can still talk of a return to nature, because we are relics of it, only slightly modified in biological respect within civilization, but try imagining the slogan “return to nature” uttered by a robot. Why, it would mean turning into deposits of iron ore!

  The impossibility of civilization’s returning to nature, which is simply equivalent to the irreversibility of history, leads Dick to the pessimistic conclusion that looking far into the future becomes such a fulfillment of dreams of power over matter as converts the ideal of progress into a monstrous caricature. This conclusion does not inevitably follow from the author’s assumptions, but it constitutes an eventuality that ought also to be taken into account. By the way, in putting things thus, we are no longer summarizing Dick’s work, but are giving rein to reflections about it, for the author himself seems so caught up in his vision that he is unconcerned about either its literal plausibility or its nonliteral message. It is the more unfortunate that criticism has not brought out the intellectual consequences of Dick’s work and has not indicated the prospects inherent in its possible continuation, prospects and consequences advantageous not only for the author but also for the entire genre, since Dick has presented us not so much with finished accomplishments as with fascinating promises. It has, indeed, been just the other way around — criticism inside the field has instinctively striven somehow to domesticate Dick’s creations, to restrain their meanings, emphasizing what in them is similar to the rest of the genre, and saying nothing about what is different — insofar as it did not simply denounce them as worthless for that difference. In this behavior a pathological aberration of the natural selection of literary works is emphatically apparent, since this selection ought to separate workmanlike mediocrity from promising originality, not lump these together, for such a “democratic” proceeding in practice equates the dross to the good metal.

  Let us admit, however, that the charms of Dick’s books are not unalloyed, so that it is with them somewhat as it is with the beauty of certain actresses, whom one had better not inspect too carefully at close range, on pain of being sadly disillusioned. There is no point in estimating the futurological likelihood of such details in this novel as those apartment and refrigerator doors that the tenant is forced to argue with. These are fictional ingredients created for the purpose of doing two jobs at once: to introduce the reader into a world decidedly different from the present-day one, and to convey a certain message to him by means of this world.

  Every literary work has two components in the above sense, since every one exhibits a given factual world and says something by means of that world. Yet in different genres and different works the ratio between the two components varies. A realistic work of fiction contains a great deal of the first component and very little of the second, as it portrays the real world,
which in its own right — that is, outside the book -does not constitute any sort of message, but merely exists and flourishes. Nevertheless, because the author makes, of course, particular choices when writing a literary work, these choices give it the character of a statement addressed to the reader. In an allegorical work there is a minimum of the first component and a maximum of the second, seeing that its world is in effect an apparatus signaling the actual content — the message — to the receiver. The tendentiousness of allegorical fiction is usually obvious, that of the realistic kind more or less well concealed. There are no works whatsoever without tendentiousness; if anyone speaks of such, what he actually has in mind is works devoid of expressly emphasized tendentiousness, which cannot be “translated” into the concrete credo of a world view. The aim of the epic, for example, is precisely to construct a world that can be interpreted in a number of ways — as the reality outside of literature can be interpreted in a number of ways. If, however, the sharp tools of criticism (of the structural kind, for instance) are applied to the epic, it is possible to detect the tendentiousness hidden even in such works, because the author is a human being and by that token a litigant in the existential process; hence complete impartiality is unattainable for him.

  Unfortunately, it is only from realistic prose that one can appeal directly to the real world. Therefore, the bane of science fiction is the desire — doomed from the start to failure — to depict worlds intended at one and the same time to be products of the imagination and to signify nothing — i.e., not to have the character of a message but to be, as it were, on a par with the things in our environment, from furniture to stars, as regards their objective self-sufficiency. This is a fatal error lodged at the roots of science fiction, because where deliberate tendentiousness is not allowed, involuntary tendentiousness seeps in. By tendency we mean a partisan bias, or point of view, which cannot be divinely objective. An epic may strike us as just that objective, because the how of its presentation (the viewpoint) is for us imperceptibly concealed under the what; the epic, too, is a partisan account of events, but we do not notice its tendentiousness because we share its bias and cannot get outside it. We discover the bias of the epic centuries later, when the passage of time has transformed the standards of “absolute objectivity” and we can perceive, in what passed for a truthful report, the manner in which “truthful reporting” was at one time understood. There are no such things as truth or objectivity in the singular; both of these contain an irreducible coefficient of historical relativity. Now, science fiction can never be on a par with the epic, since what the science-fiction work presents belongs to one time (most often the future), whereas how it tells its story belongs to another time, the present. Even if imagination succeeds in rendering plausible how it might be, it cannot break completely with the way of apprehending events that is peculiar to the here and now. This way is not only an artistic convention; it is considerably more -a type of classification, interpretation, and rationalization of the visible world that is peculiar to an era. Consequently the problem content of an epic can be deeply hidden, but that of science fiction must be legible, otherwise the story, declining to deal with nonfictional problems and not achieving epic objectivity, slides fatally down and comes to rest on some such support as the stereotype of the fairy tale, the adventure thriller, the myth, the framework of the detective story, or some hybrid as eclectic as it is trashy. A way out of the dilemma may consist in works for which componential analysis, designed to separate what is “factual” from what forms the “message” (“seen” from a “viewpoint”), proves altogether impracticable. The reader of such a work does not know whether what he is shown is supposed to exist like a stone or a chair, or whether it is supposed also to signify something beyond itself. The indeterminacy of such a creation is not diminished by its author’s commentaries, since the author can be mistaken in these, like a man who tries to explain the real meaning of his own dreams. Hence I consider Dick’s own comments to be inessential to the analysis of his works.