Waggish

Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006)

Lem's obituary is not as unhappy one to write as many, because he more than accomplished his life's work. Having identified the issues he wished to examine, he synthesized them wish vigor and brilliance, and to quote someone or other, if he did not exhaust them, they exhausted him. He had a long, productive, successful career, and he never wrote the same book twice. Under the guise of fiction (and sometimes not), he became the speculative master of two issues: evolution and technology. I cannot think of another writer who dealt with the essence and possibilities of these subjects better than Lem.

From both, Lem acquired a resigned pessimism. The limits and flaws expressed in humanity (and via humanity, in technology) were not ones of some nebulous human essence, but the product of a process--evolution--for which individuals and society were meaningless side effects. Lem's recurrent, thrilling ploy was to play technology off of evolutionary fatalism, and to show the sparks when technological ambition runs up against the epistemological limits that bound a species. It made for concentrated stories with novel ideas, and a rigorous approach to potential technologies and societal trends. His Summa Technologiae (1964) still puts most so-called "futurism" to shame.

Politically, he could fall prey to an cold anti-humanism. His enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin ("He's what the people want," he declared), his sexism, and his indifference towards issues of race and class except in the most general anthopological sense all bespoke an unwillingness to be engaged in normative ethical debates. This is not unusual for science-fiction. Just as war historians celebrate the tactics of generals while ignoring those who got it in the neck, the sweep of (imagined) future history has led many science-fiction authors to embrace a cruel stability or ignore the collateral damage of establishing galactic empires--or both. These conservative instincts, pace Ellis Sharp's belief that science fiction is mostly progressive, have in fact driven the main currents of science-fiction even at its best, from Wells to Cordwainer Smith to Mark Geston. The opposing sf trend that includes such people as Delany, Joanna Russ, and the also sadly departed Octavia Butler is so drastically different in its focus from the dominant trend that it might as well be another genre. But this is a topic for another time.

But Lem, more than many of his peers, could show compassion about human suffering, as he did, albeit ironically, in "Altruizine" and His Master's Voice. "Altruizine" especially stands out as a sad allegory about a race of super-beings' last attempt to bring about universal happiness, the previous 64,000 having failed. It is not the stuff to inspire polities, but it is a very human satire for any of us who have gotten frustrated at people's constant inability to act in their own best interests.

I wrote a callow appreciation of Lem many years ago, but I still agree with a lot of it; you can see it below the fold. I would change my assessment of Lem's ultimate message and his philosophical attitudes (see above!), but the explication of his work still seems reasonable to me. And I still think that Lem deserves a place next to Dante, Borges, and Stapledon in the pantheon of pure imagination.

Stanislaw Lem, by Young Mr. Waggish

Stanislaw Lem’s fame rests in his simply being better than most science fiction writers, but since the overall quality of science fiction is so low and its hidden masterpieces mostly ignored, the deeper merits of Lem’s work have gone mostly ignored. Only Philip K. Dick offers a more fully enveloping sense of doubt; only Calvino’s Cosmicomics are as metaphysically playful. And there is no science fiction writer, and few contemporary writers at all, who have been more philosophically inventive and rigorous. The forty years of Lem’s work divide into two general periods, pre- and post-1970. His early work is straightforward science fiction of a very high order, but his later work is almost unprecedented, a bizarre admixture of Borges, Schopenhauer, and Bertrand Russell.

Lem’s first significant work came in the 1950’s and 60’s. Eden, Solaris, and The Invincible all offer variations on human engagement with incomprehensible alien entities. In a detached, sometimes clunky style, Lem communicates failure without catharsis, as scientists discover alien life only to find their understanding disjoint with it. Solaris is the most effective of the lot, and a deserved classic. After many years of failed explorations of a seemingly sentient ocean on another planet, a psychologist arrives and finds his dead wife returned to him by the ocean. The failure of any communication with the ocean mirrors the “cruel miracle” of the resurrection, and his personal collapse is a moving abdication of any detached pretense towards the process. Solaris dissolves the boundaries between scientific enquiry and human emotional response; it is Lem’s justification of his larger project.

The other early novels portray alien encounters in a less personal and more scientific framework, but Lem’s concern emerges fully formed: a fascination with humanity’s cognitive limits, and our behavior when confronted with them. His early work owes little to contemporaneous American and British developments in science-fiction (which Lem was unaware of), developing the exploratory tradition of H.G. Wells and particularly Olaf Stapledon, Lem’s avowed hero. The complexity, breadth, and maturity of Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker are prominent in Lem’s work, and distinguish Lem from his Anglophone peers. Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series is the only other major work that draws as much from Stapledon, but it is dragged down by theology and her own social agenda. Unlike Lessing, Lem knows when to drop the polemic, and his work has held up better.

Lem’s later work expands on his themes laterally rather than vertically; having isolated a rich territory to mine, he reframed it in philosophical, epistemological, and hermeneutic terms. By the late 1960’s, Lem had, by his own account, grown disenchanted with the constraints of the genre science-fiction novel. The neuroses, social criticism, and stylistic adventures of the “new wave” held little interest for him; his interest in science fiction was too literal to be absorbed into human metaphor, as with J.G. Ballard, or turned to contemporary critique, as with John Sladek, Mark Geston, and John Brunner. It is both Lem’s virtue and his failing that he overlooks cultural disputes to reach outward. This author who avoids female characters because they would be “distracting” and considers ethics virtually a priori can avoid getting mired.

The first work to show a decisive break with tradition is His Master’s Voice. Lem constructs a narrative that surpasses all that he had done before, while simultaneously collapsing it under its own limitations. The theme is the same—first contact with aliens, this time in the form of a peculiar sequence of neutrino radiation—but Lem develops the concept far more deeply. Rather than focusing on the end result, Lem’s concern is the nature of human scientific endeavor itself, and the epistemological and moral problems underlying it. The characters, scientists and politicians, are little more than archetypes—the humanist, the utilitarian, the verificationist—but Lem tangibly captures their instincts. The narrator describes one: “Before me would appear Dill, dry, thin as a beanpole, inflexible, his face like a portrait of Hegel—and I hated Hegel, I could not read him, because he was so sure of himself, as if the Absolute Itself spoke through his lips for the greater glory of Prussia. Hegel, I realize now, had nothing to do with it; I had put him in the place of another person.” The scientists are convincingly brilliant, and their utter failure when faced with their own limits is frightening.

His Master’s Voice is Lem’s most incisive exploration of his earlier themes, but he enjoins it with a new linguistic perspective. The sequence of neutrino radiation, it is made clear, is a language. Lem discusses the inseparability of cultural from acultural language in the transmission, saying, “a program tape for a digital computer might also fit into a player piano [and] here or there one will hear some musical phrase.” The failure at the heart of the His Master’s Voice is dependent on Lem’s elaboration of this concept. It appears in nascent form: the scientists are not able to determine what conceptual apparatus exists for the message, and are left with wild theories and despair. One scientist says, “We do not know of languages beyond the genetic code and genetic languages, but that does not mean there are none.”

His Master’s Voice was the fulcrum of Lem’s work. After it, he used the novel form more sparingly, and his work became far more eclectic. He indulged in playful fables in Mortal Engines and The Cyberiad, which masterfully use robots to isolate the most petty and destructive impulses of humanity. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is a strange Kafka and Sartre-derived bureaucratic satire, which extemporizes on themes he had already sewn up. The Chain of Chance reads like a novel-length precis for a mystery novel, all information and no suspense. It is not successful, but it points to how Lem was internalizing the influence of Borges, which would make itself fully shown in A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of book reviews of non-existent books.

A Perfect Vacuum mixes major and minor works, but on the whole it is Lem’s most impressive display of pure imagination and theory. Parodies of postmodern literature and theory sit next to dark fables and bizarre cosmogonies. One of the most dazzling stories is “Non Serviam,” which describes the creation and development of computer “personoids,” which exist in a rarefied state of pure idealism and no knowledge of any world beyond their own. The story is an extended description of the personoids theology, and their final word on their creators: “A God not almighty would be deserving of feelings akin to pity.” The story is remarkable for reversing the general trend of Lem’s work, which is to put humanity as an inferior species to, say, supercomputers. The inferior/superior distinction is rendered somewhat arbitrary—the conceptual bounds simply exist, and to reduce incomprehension to theology misrepresents the issue.

Borges was concerned with metaphysical improbability and impossibility; his characters (Funes, the Secret Miracle, Menard) are often the subject of impossible transformations. Lem’s approach is more pragmatic, but in A Perfect Vacuum, he deals in these same impossibilities, but with a more biting approach. Where Borges’ construction of a society conducted by lottery is playfully unreal, Lem’s homage to that story, “Being, Inc.”, turns the issue into “the manipulation of minds which does not lessen the full subjective sense of spontaneity and freedom.” Borges was content to muse; Lem’s constructions are designed to test the limits of human behavior and convention.

Like the discourse of His Master’s Voice, the constructions often take the forms of “other languages.” “Non Serviam” describes the creation and development of computer “personoids,” which exist in a rarefied state of pure idealism and no knowledge of any world beyond their own. The story is an extended description of the personoids theology, and their final word on their creators: “A God not almighty would be deserving of feelings akin to pity.” The story is not completely successful; Lem does not convince us that the personoids are, after all, so different from us, so their lack of comprehension of their gods’ existence seems ill-defined. But the story is remarkable for reversing the general trend of Lem’s work, which is to put humanity as an inferior species to, say, supercomputers (as with the amazing Golem XIV). The inferior/superior distinction is rendered somewhat arbitrary—the conceptual bounds simply exist, and to reduce incomprehension to theology misrepresents the issue.

Lem’s admitted hero is Bertrand Russell, and the strengths and weaknesses of Russell’s rationalist approach are both present in Lem’s writing. Lem has the clarity of Russell’s mathematical methods, which permit the framing of conceptual boundaries in very exact terms. Yet like Russell, he cannot see these boundaries as anything but literal; he has no trouble in assuming that conceptual frameworks for species are a priori, and just as easily depicts the blockages. There may be incomprehensibility, but the outline of what lies on the other side of the fence is clearly visible for Lem; the incomprehensible is a known quantity. This was Russell’s undoing: he could not get beyond certain conceptual schemas as simply being given. Yet Lem has turned this limitation to his favor; no one has more precisely framed the very limits of rationalist understanding on its own terms. And since prevailing cultural attitudes outside have not caught up with post-Russellian philosophy, Lem’s work speaks more to the times than most academic thinking.

But there is also a prevailing and increasing sense of despair in Lem’s work that derives from Schopenhauer. From Solaris on, the conceptual failures are not merely explorations of limits, but painful, dangerous failures. It is blatant in His Master’s Voice, but even in the playfulness of A Perfect Vacuum, the folly he portrays is one of corruption, of humanity extending itself in directions that are self-destructive when their limits are reached. The elephantine drive that possesses the scientists in His Master’s Voice is a thinly disguised appropriation of Schopenhauer’s all-extending Will, which Lem invokes, with reverence, in several of his books. Russell’s pessimism, like that of many science-fiction writers, never went beyond concern for the contingent, immediate future. Lem’s more far-reaching concerns over the inevitable failures of our scientific endeavors paint him as a moralist, where Russell was only a libertine. The strength of Lem’s moralism and his meticulous, convincing imagination make him the scientific conscience of our time.

Posted by waggish at April 4, 2006 10:13 PM