A Perfect Vacuum

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

A Perfect Vacuum

Les Robinsonades

Gigamesh

Sexplosion

Gruppenführer Louis XVI

Rien du tout, ou la conséquence

Pericalypsis

Idiota

U-Write-It

Odysseus of Ithaca

Toi

Being Inc.

Die Kultur als Fehler

De Impossibilitate Vitae and, De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi

Non Serviam

The New Cosmogony

Footnotes

Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright © 1971 by Stanisław Lem. English translation copyright © 1979, 1978 by Stanisław Lem. Reprinted 1999 by arrangement with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-1733-4
ISBN-10: 0-8101-1733-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lem, Stanisław.
[Doskonała próżnia. English]
A perfect vacuum / Stanisław Lem ; translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8101-1733-9 (pa. : alk. paper)
1. Imaginary books and libraries Reviews. I. Kandel, Michael. II. Title.
PG7158.L39D613 1999
891.8' 5373—dc21 99-42422
CIP

©The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

(Czytelnik, Warsaw)

 

Reviewing nonexistent books is not Lem's invention; we find such experiments not only in a contemporary writer, Jorge Luis Borges (for example, his “Investigations of the Writings of Herbert Quaine”), but the idea goes further back—and even Rabelais was not the first to make use of it.
A Perfect Vacuum
is unusual in that it purports to be an anthology made up entirely of such critiques. Pedantry or a joke, this methodicalness? We suspect the author intends a joke; nor is this impression weakened by the Introduction—long-winded and theoretical—in which we read: “The writing of a novel is a form of the loss of creative liberty....In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude still less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he has enslaved himself—by the theme selected. The critic is in a worse position: as the convict is chained to his wheelbarrow, so the reviewer is chained to the work reviewed. The writer loses his freedom in his own book, the critic in another's.”

The overstatement of these simplifications is too patent to be taken seriously. In the next section of the Introduction (“Auto-Momus”) we read: “Literature to date has told us of fictitious
characters.
We shall go further: we shall depict fictitious
books.
Here is a chance to regain creative liberty, and at the same time to wed two opposing spirits—that of the belletrist and that of the critic.”

“Auto-Momus”—Lem explains—is to be free creation “squared,” because the critic of the text, if placed within that very text, will have more possibilities for maneuvering than the narrator of traditional or nontraditional literature. One might go along with this, for in fact literature nowadays fights for greater distance from the thing created, like a runner on his second wind. The trouble is, Lem's erudite Introduction doesn't seem to want to end. In it he discourses on the positive aspects of nothingness, on ideal objects in mathematics, and on new metalevels of language. It is all a bit drawn out, as if in jest. What is more, with this overture Lem is leading the reader (and perhaps himself as well?) afield. For there are pseudoreviews in
A Perfect Vacuum
that are not merely a collection of anecdotes. I would divide the reviews, in opposition to the author, into the following three groups:

(1) Parodies, pastiches, gibes: here belong “The Robinsonad,” “Nothing, or the Consequence” (both texts, in different ways, poke fun at the
nouveau roman),
and perhaps also “You” and “Gigamesh.” It's true that “You” is a somewhat chancy entry, because to invent a
bad
book, which one can then lambaste because it is bad, is rather cheap. The most original formally is “Nothing, or the Consequence,” since no one could possibly have written that novel, and therefore the device of the pseudo-review permits an acrobatic trick: a critique of a book that not only does not exist but also cannot. “Gigamesh” was the least to my taste. The idea is to give the show away; yet is it really right to dispose of a masterpiece with
those
kinds of jokes? Perhaps, if one does not pen them oneself.

(2) Drafts and outlines (for they actually are, in their own way, outlines): “Gruppenführer Louis XVI,” for instance, or “The Idiot,” and “A Question of the Rate.” Each of these could—who knows—become the embryo of a decent novel. Even so, one ought to write the novels first. A synopsis, critical or otherwise, only amounts to an hors d'oeuvre that whets our appetite for a course not found in the kitchen. Why not found? Criticism ad hominem is not “cricket,” but this once I will indulge in it. The author had ideas that he was unable to realize in full form; he could not write, but regretted not writing—and there you have the whole genesis of this aspect of
A Perfect Vacuum.
Lem, sufficiently clever to foresee precisely such a charge, decided to protect himself—with an introduction. That is why in “Auto-Momus” he speaks of the poverty of the craft of prose, of how one must, as an artisan at his workbench, whittle descriptions to say that the Marquise left the house at five. But good craft is not impoverishment. Lem took fright at the difficulties presented by each of these three titles, which I have mentioned only by way of example. He preferred not to risk it, preferred to duck the issue, to take the coward's way out. In stating, “Every book is a grave of countless others, it deprives them of life by supplanting them,” he gives us to understand that he has more ideas than biological time
(Ars longa, vita brevis).
However, there are not all that many significant, highly promising ideas in
A Perfect Vacuum.
There are displays of agility, to which I alluded, but there we are speaking of jokes. Yet I suspect a matter of more importance—namely, a longing that cannot be satisfied.

The last group of works in the volume convinces me that I am not mistaken: “De Impossibilitate Vitae,” “Civilization as Error” and—most of all!—“The New Cosmogony.”

“Civilization as Error” stands on their head the views which Lem has more than once expounded in his books both belletristic and discursive. The technology explosion, there condemned as the destroyer of culture, here is put in the role of the savior of humanity. And for a second time Lem plays apostate in “De Impossibilitate Vitae.” Let us not be misled by the amusing absurdity of the long causal chains of the family chronicle. The purpose lies not in these comic anecdotes; what is taking place is an attack on Lem's Holy of Holies—on the theory of probability, i.e., of chance, i.e., of that category on which he built and developed so many of his voluminous conceptions. The attack is carried out in a clownish setting, and this is meant to blunt its edge. Was it, then, if only for a moment, conceived not as satire?

Doubts like these are dispelled by “The New Cosmogony,” the true
pièce de résistance
of the book, hidden in its pages like a Trojan horse. If not a joke, not a fictional review, then what precisely is it? A bit heavy for a joke, loaded down as it is with such massive scientific argumentation—we know that Lem has devoured encyclopedias; shake him and out come logarithms and formulas. “The New Cosmogony” is the fictional oration of a Nobel Prize laureate that presents a revolutionary new model of the Universe. If I did not know any other book of Lem's I might conclude that the thing was meant to be a gag for the benefit of some thirty initiates—that is, physicists and other relativists—in the entire world. That, however, seems unlikely. What then? I suspect, again, that there was an idea, an idea that burst upon the author—and from which he shrank. Of course he will never admit to this, and neither I nor anyone else will be able to prove to him that he has taken seriously the model of the Universe as a game. He can always plead the facetiousness of the context, and point to the very title of the book
(A Perfect Vacuum
—that is to say, a book “about nothing”). And besides, the best refuge and excuse is
licentia poetica.

All the same, I believe that behind these texts there hides a certain gravity. The Universe as a game? An Intentional Physics? Being a worshiper of science, having prostrated himself before its sacred methodology, Lem could not well assume the role of its foremost heresiarch and dissenter. Therefore, he could not place this thought within any discursive exposition. On the other hand, to make the idea of a “game of Universe” the pivot of a story plot would have meant writing yet another work, the umpteenth, of “normal science fiction.”

What then remained? For a sound mind, nothing but to keep silent. Books that the writer does not write, that he will certainly never undertake, come what may, and that can be attributed to fictitious authors—are not such books, by virtue of their nonexistence, remarkably like silence? Could one place oneself at any safer distance from heterodox thoughts? To speak of these books, of these treatises, as belonging to others, is practically the same as to speak—without speaking. Particularly when this takes place within the scenario of a joke.

And so, from long years of secret hungering for the nourishment of realism, from notions too bold with regard to one's own views for them to be voiced outright, from all that one dreams of and dreams in vain, arose
A Perfect Vacuum.
The theoretical Introduction, which ostensibly makes the case for a “new genre of literature,” is a maneuver to divert attention, the deliberately exhibitory gesture of the prestidigitator who wishes to draw our eyes from what he is actually doing. We are to believe that feats of dexterity are being performed, when it is otherwise. It is not the trick of the “pseudo-review” that gave birth to these works; rather, they, demanding—in vain—to be expressed, used this trick as an excuse and a pretext. In the absence of the trick all would have remained in the realm of the unsaid. For we have here the betrayal of fantasy to the cause of well-grounded realism, and defection in empiricism, and heresy in science. Did Lem really think he would not be seen through in his machination? It is simplicity itself: to shout out, with laughter, what one would dare not whisper in earnest. Contrary to what the Introduction says, the critic does not have to be chained to the book “as the convict is ... to his wheelbarrow”: the critic's freedom does not lie in raising up or tearing down the book, but lies in this, that through the book, as through a microscope, he may observe the author; and in that case
A Perfect Vacuum
turns out to be a tale of what is desired but is not to be had. It is a book of ungranted wishes. And the only subterfuge the evasive Lem might still avail himself of would be a counterattack: in the assertion that it was not I, the critic, but he himself, the author, who wrote the present review and added it to—and made it part of
—A Perfect Vacuum.

(Editions du Seuil, Paris)

 

After Defoe's Robinson came, watered down for the kiddies, the Swiss Robinson and a whole slew of further infantilized versions of the life on the desert island; then a few years ago the Paris Olympia published, in step with the times,
The Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe,
a trivial thing whose author there is no point even in naming, because he hid under one of those pseudonyms that are the property of the publisher himself, who hires toilers of the pen for well-known ends. But for
The Robinsonad
of Marcel Coscat it has been worth waiting. This is the social life of Robinson Crusoe, his social-welfare work, his arduous, hard, and overcrowded existence, for what is dealt with here is the sociology of isolation—the mass culture of an unpopulated island that, by the end of the novel, is packed solid.

Monsieur Coscat has not written, as the reader will quickly observe, a work of a plagiaristic or commercial nature. He goes into neither the sensational nor the pornographic aspect of the desert island; he does not direct the lust of the castaway to the palm trees with their hairy coconuts, to the fish, the goats, the axes, the mushrooms, and the pork salvaged from the shattered ship. In this book, to spite Olympia, Robinson is no longer the male in rut who, like a phallic unicorn trampling the shrubbery, the groves of sugar cane and bamboo, violates the sands of the beach, the mountaintops, the waters of the bay, the screeches of the seagulls, the lofty shadows of the albatross, or the sharks washed ashore in a storm. He who craves such material will not find in this book food for the inflamed imagination. The Robinson of Marcel Coscat is a logician in the pure state, an extreme conventionalist, a philosopher who took the conclusions of his doctrine as far as possible; and the shipwreck—of the three-master
Patricia
—was for him only the opening of the gates, the severing of the ties, the preparation of the laboratory for the experiment, for it enabled him to reach into his own being uncontaminated by the presence of Others.