REVIEW-ARTICLE
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Istvan
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
How Not to Write a Book About Lem
Richard E. Ziegfeld. Stanislaw Lem. NY: Frederick Ungar, 1985. 188pp.
$8.95 (paper).
It is hard to imagine a more thankless task than writing a
book about Lem. More than any other writer of our time, except perhaps Borges, Lem
presents the world as metacommentary. The first premise of his fiction is that the various
constructions of reality presented by science, myth, romance, religion, and the other
institutions of intelligibility, are merely commentaries on elusive phenomena, which are
most probably also commentaries, albeit fragmentary, indecipherable ones. His whole corpus
is figured, as it were, in the library of Solaris Station, where every "theory"
a reader might construct about "the secret" is already there on the shelf,
probably already refuted by another hypothesis, and absorbed into a third one's synthesis.
Since neither Lem's protagonists nor his readers ever arrive at an Archimedean point
outside the totality they are trying to understand, no one system of commentary is ever
sufficient. It is the play of commentary that creates Lem's universe.
Any critic who sets out to explicate this universe risks
writing unintentional self-parody. For which critical approach is not already on the shelf
in the Station library? How can one write a commentary on Lem without instantly becoming a
version of one of Lem's characters? How does one escape becoming the butt of a Lemian
joke? For those who do rush in, there are several interesting paths to Lem's work, most of
which remain completely open at the moment. To mention just a few examples, one could
explore Lem's place in the Central and Eastern European tradition of philosophical
fantasy; his exemplary role as a non Anglo-American writer of SF; his fairly unified, if
unsystematic, commentary on the state of culture in this early stage of techno-evolution;
the implications of his views on SF for other modes of literature; his "empirical
theory of literature," which might be tested on his own works and against other
contemporary critical schools; or even "meta-sociological" studies of the way
the career of his books comments on the fate of his "metafuturological" and
"metahistorical" ideas.
Since it is the first book-length work on Lem published in
English, Richard Ziegfeld's book will probably provide the first exposure to Lem criticism
for many readers. This, to my mind, is the only reason for discussing it.
Ziegfeld's book uses the format of the book report, and
reads much like Cliff's Notes, without their élan and clarity. It is divided into short
chapters of 5 to 16 pages, each dealing with one of the major fictions published in
English before 1982. Ziegfeld writes that his book has "two strategies":
"The first is a clear, simple overview of [Lem's] career through 1982. Within
individual chapters, it refers to five elements: a plot precis and discussion of plot,
theme, characterization technique, and symbolism. Where appropriate, special attention is
paid to critical problems with each book. Finally, comparison is used to evaluate the
place of each book in the Lem corpus" (p. x). As for his critical intention, Ziegfeld
states he is following Auden's maxim that "the only truly useful literary criticism
is advocacy" (ibid.). This means, he adds, that he wants mainly to "share
a sense of enthusiasm about Lem's virtues," "offer a candid report on th[e]
potential difficulties" in Lem's work that "may not appeal to certain
readers," and ultimately, "facilitat[e] greater American awareness that [Lem] is
one of the great writers in twentieth century letters" (ibid.) These
professions inspire certain questions at the outset: For whom did Ziegfeld write the book,
and what are the standards for determining Lem's virtues and "potential
difficulties"? Those questions are never answered. They are not even addressed.
It is impossible to tell who might find this book useful,
or how much--or little--the author truly knows about Lem. The book is simultaneously
pedestrian and dizzyingly contorted. The précis and discussions are garbled and violently
condensed, and Ziegfeld never seems to question whether his mechanical approach might be
inappropriate for an iconoclastic writer like Lem. Although he promises a "clear,
simple overview" of Lem's career, it will not make much sense to a reader who does
not already know a great deal more than what Ziegfeld tells. Moreover, an overview based
only on Lem's translated works is a bit too simple. Ziegfeld does not mention Eden
anywhere in the book; he mentions Summa Technologiae and Science Fiction and
Futurology once or twice, and even quotes a sentence from the former, but he nowhere
discusses what is in those books and how they relate to the fiction. It isn't clear to me
why he does this. At the very least, it raises the reader's suspicions that he may not be
as versed in Lem's work as he would at first glance appear to be.
This suspicion returns again and again, since Ziegfeld's
most characteristic tactic is to make lists of arbitrary and empty things as if they were
self-evident and significant. For example, in the biographical introduction Ziegfeld
repeats from The High Castle Lem's list of the authors he read as an adolescent,
including "Verne, Wells, Stapledon, Rilke, Conrad, Saint-Exupéry, Fedro, Karl May,
and many Eastern European writers, including Sinkiewicz, Slwacki [sic],
Pitrigrilli" and later "Dostoyevsky, Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schulz" (p. 3).
With the exception of Dostoyevsky, none of these writers' names appears again in
Ziegfeld's book--nor does he identify those writers who might be assumed to be unfamiliar
to American readers. For whom is the book intended then? For an American audience
unfamiliar with Lem, or for one so versed in his fiction that it can infer the influence
of these writers, including even Slowacki, Schulz, and Sinkiewicz, let alone Fedro and
Pitrigrilli? And again the suspicion: Has Ziegfeld contented himself with repeating what Lem wrote, without bothering to think about it?
Nothing else in the book is quite as bad as the
biographical introduction, but many of the book's problems appear there in sharp focus.
Much of it simply repeats bits and pieces of information Lem provides in The High
Castle, along with lists of disconnected and trivial details without apparent purpose
or design from interviews and reviewers' opinions. Ziegfeld treats Lem's memoir-novel as
if it were both literal and necessary truth, apparently oblivious to the possibility that
the "autobiography" is a work of fiction and that its "facts" are part
of an aesthetic design. Ziegfeld's literal-mindedness and insensitivity to Lem's
all-pervasive irony is stunning: "[Lem's] personality as a child is best described as
reflective, irreverent, somewhat distant, occasionally ambivalent, deeply individualistic,
and highly creative. His adult personality and his work are very similar" (p. 2).
What a coincidence! And yet how Lem's experiences during the war, the relocation, and the
Stalinist '50s might have affected his fiction and his memory never comes up in this book.
Why, one wonders, even mention biographical details, if not to help investigate the work?
Regarding the chapters on Lem's works, Ziegfeld's approach
might euphemistically be called "neo-Aristotelian" formal analysis. Although in
the current critical climate such a method is considered part of the fossil record, it is
not necessarily wrongheaded for studying Lem, since he does work to create some
traditional effects, even when he subverts them with irony. I am not sure about character,
but studying Lem's plots could be a way into his work. Anyone who has ever tried to
abstract one of Lem's plots knows that it is particularly difficult. This belongs to Lem's
subject matter: how we paraphrase a story reveals the decisions that we have made about
"what it really means"; interpretation is commentary and commentary is a form of
closure. Most of Lem's characters perform similar paraphrases in their fictive worlds--and
act on them, with comic/catastrophic results. Lem's plots are meta-plots: they are not
only skeletons of the themes; they are doubles, seducing readers to duplicate
intellectually the characters' ontological constructions.
But Ziegfeld is not interested in plot theory. His main
concern is to indicate whether a given work is "Aristotelian,"
"anti-Aristotelian," or mixed, and it is clear where Ziegfeld's sympathies lie:
things Aristotelian are "fully developed," "charming" (p. 92),
"intriguing" (p. 94), characters have "gravity" and
"greatness" (p. 111), while the anti-Aristotelian tradition provides "the
antihero, concern about existential angst, black humor, generic experimentation, and a
taste for the ludicrous" (p. 92).
Ziegfeld wants to treat Lem as above all a writer of
"philosophical literature." Accordingly, he lavishes most of his attention on
Lem's themes and their symbolic embodiments, and it is here that the intellectual poverty
of his book is most apparent. Rather than discussing the extremely problematic
relationships Lem's writing has with philosophical and literary topoi, Ziegfeld
merely identifies a certain number of "great themes" in each work, giving a
capsule description of each, and providing textual evidence by retelling the parts of the
story that supposedly illustrate the theme. The Invincible, for example, has two:
"man's invincibility and capacity for heroism; and man's relation to an evolving
artificial intelligence" (p. 73). His Master's Voice has at least three:
"the state of man, the nature of the universe, and communication" (p. 107). In
his whole corpus, Ziegfeld perorates, Lem "writes about epistemology, reality,
ethics, and theology, [but] his favorite concern is man--man in relation to other men, the
universe, and higher civilizations. He writes about communication, choice, freedom,
isolation, sanity, hope, heroism, and creativity" (p. 143). What, one wonders, are not
Lem's themes?
Thus, although the book has no unified critical point, it
does have a single "strategy": to reduce Lem's writings to ideas with lofty
names that are so abstract and inclusive that they are emptied of real content. There is
no particular reason why these should be considered Lem's themes and not others--for
example, fluidity, or paradox, or play. The reader never knows why the names Ziegfeld
gives to things are necessarily the right ones or the only ones. Nor is the absence of
"play" from his theme-lists accidental. Where it is unavoidable, as in The
Futurological Congress and A Perfect Vacuum, he attributes it (calling it
"zaniness" [p. 127]) to Lem's disillusionment. Wit and play apparently cannot be
the point of any of Lem's works. It would allow Lemian irony to devour all those great
themes that Ziegfeld is attached to.
Ziegfeld's discussions of genre, character, and irony and
symbolism are similarly arbitrary and superficial. Symbolism is an especially interesting
problem in the works of Lem, whom the Soviet critic Kagarlitsky called the most romantic
writer of SF. But Ziegfeld's notion of symbol has nothing to do with the philosophical
dimensions of symbolism. For him the symbol is essentially a multi-purpose "objective
correlative" (p. 142). His "analysis" of symbolism consists of reducing
certain "symbols" to their idea-referents with annoying and simplistic
certainty. For example, apropos of Memoirs Found in a Bathtub: "'My case'
stands for an individual's existential situation in the world and the hermetic isolation
of the Last Pentagon for the insularity of the bureaucracy. A razor suggests the
narrator's flirtation with suicide, tests and codes refer to the secrecy and paranoia that
the bureaucracy engenders, and the endless corridors point out to the labyrinthine nature
of bureaucratic structure" (p. 68). If we took Ziegfeld's idea of symbol seriously,
it would leave us with nothing that is not a "symbol." Nor does his extremely
literal sense of symbol allow for the possibilities of irony and self-negation: the sense
in which models and model-building are themselves "symbolic," as science is in Solaris
and His Master's Voice, as the book is in A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary
Magnitude, and as SF is in almost everything Lem has written.
There are other problems, not so central perhaps, but
extremely irritating in a work nominally adhering to scholarly conventions. Why are the
names of some of the journals Lem was associated with rendered in untranslated Polish,
while others are in English only (p. 5)? For a book about "one of the outstanding
writers in twentieth-century letters," why does Ziegfeld rely so much on comments by
rather dubious authorities, such as Peter Nicholl and Brian Ash? Why do some quotations
come supplied with bibliographical references and others not? Why is Ziegfeld silent until
the last two pages of the book about Lem's Science Fiction and Futurology, surely
an important text for a study of Lem's fiction and available in German? And in one case,
at least, Ziegfeld clearly and seriously misinterprets his own source to produce a predictably garbled point: "As Michael Kandel aptly notes in the introduction to Mortal
Engines, man is unique in his capacity for consciousness. 'Consciousness,' he says,
'not life, is sacred to Lem"' (p. 85). Of course, the point of Kandel's well-known
passage (and all of Lem's comments on artificial intelligence) is exactly the opposite:
it is human arrogance to insist on anthropocentric consciousness. Finally, I trust that
the passages I have quoted illustrate that the prose of Ziegfeld's book is as inept as the
argument. Given the faults of this book, the editors at Ungar must be held at least as
responsible for having it go to press in its present form as Ziegfeld is for submitting
it.
In all fairness, Ziegfeld has some interesting
moments--moments that deserve more careful and lucid treatment than he gives them. In
particular, his frequent comparisons of Lem's fiction to that of Sartre and Camus are
suggestive. The existentialist strain in Lem's fiction is indeed very strong, and has not
yet received much attention. Ziegfeld's bibliography of works by and about Lem up to 1980
is extensive.
In the final tally, however, Ziegfeld's Stanislaw Lem is
a vapid and confused book, combining pedestrian analysis with tone-deaf prose. It is
probably not harmful, but, except for its bibliography, it is useless--both to those who
know Lem's work and to those who do not.
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