Stanislaw Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexisting books
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Stanislaw Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexisting books may be found in his following works: three collections of faux reviews of fuctitious books: A Perfect Vacuum (Doskonała próżnia, 1971), Provocation (Prowokacja, 1984), and Library of 21st Century (Biblioteka XXI wieku, 1986) translated as One Human Minute, and Imaginary Magnitude (Wielkość Urojona, 1973), a collection of introductions to nonexistent books.
Reviewing nonexistent books, a modern form of pseudepigraphy, is not a theme unique to Lem (consider Jorge Luis Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the "Quixote" or An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain), but the idea of an entire anthology of such pieces is rather novel. Lem attempted to create different fictional reviewers and authors for each of the books. In his own words: "I tried to imitate various styles – that of a book review, a lecture, a presentation, a speech (of a Nobel Prize laureate) and so on". Some of the reviews are lighthearted, concentrating mostly on the story; others, however, read more like serious, academic reviews. Some of the reviews are parodies, or the books being reviewed are parodies or complete impossibilities, others are quite serious and can be seen almost as drafts for novels that Lem never got around to write. It can also be said that in this book Lem criticizes the postmodernist "games for games' sake" ethos, turning it against itself.
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"A Perfect Vacuum"
A Perfect Vacuum (Template:Lang-pl) is a 1971 book by Polish author Stanisław Lem. It is an anthology of reviews of nonexistent books. It was translated into English by Michael Kandel. Some of the reviews remind the reader of drafts of his science-fiction novels, some read like philosophical pieces across scientific topics, from cosmology to the pervasiveness of computers, finally others satirise and parody everything from the nouveau roman to pornography, Ulysses, authorless writing, and Dostoevsky.
Contents
The book contains reviews of 16 imaginary books and one real book: itself.
- A Perfect Vacuum: review of the book itself, by the author himself.
- Les Robinsonades
- Gigamesh: fictional 'Gigamesh' is to the Gilgamesh legend what James Joyce's Ulysses is to Odyssey. Lem spends his review doing the same sort of dissection of this fictional novel, word by word, phoneme by phoneme, that critics have been doing to Joyce for years.
- The Sexplosion: a novel concerned with the extinction of the sex drive.
- Gruppenführer Louis XVI is a story about how an ex-Nazi in Argentina recreates the pre-Revolutionary French Court in the jungle.
- Rien du tout, ou la consequence: review of a book written entirely in negations ("The train did not arrive. He did not come.").
- Pericalypsis: - Lem's critique of reviewers and modern art.
- Idiota
- U-Write-It: a publication described as a literary erector set. It gives the reader blank pages and strips containing fragments of some great novel and orders the reader to re-arrange them at will.
- Odysseus of Ithaca
- Toi
- Being Inc.: review of a book that portrays the world as the result of elaborate computer planning of individual lives, a huge choreography of humanity;
- Die Kultur Als Fehler, or 'Civilization as a mistake': One of Lem's philosophical pieces, he argues that humanity has tried to give meaning to its frailties and weaknesses by claiming they are part of a larger plan of things. Now that technological progress has allowed us to evade many of these hardships, some people oppose that – consciously or not, because it would mean that all the previous suffering has been unnecessary and technology is our saviour.
- De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi: two books reviewed in one review, both dealing with alternative history. The former consists almost entirely of tracking all the things that must have happened for the supposed author to have been born: his father must have married his mother, which in turn depended on them meeting during the War, which in turn depended on multitude of other events. Here Lem argues for the butterfly effect: changing one thing has an almost infinite number of unimaginable consequences.
- Non Serviam: Is an elaborate satire of the idea of artificial intelligence that gets to the heart of the moral dilemma that true success would create. It is written in the dry style of a book review that might appear in a broad scientific journal sometime in the near future. It discusses the book, Non Serviam, by Professor James Dobb, and through this the field of "personetics", the simulated creation of truly intelligent beings ("personoids") inside a computer. It starts with a quote that "[personetics is] the cruelest science man ever created." Lem has the erudite reviewer describe the general theory of personetics, the history and state of the art, and some of the consequences, liberally quoting the work of experts in the field. Later the reviewer quotes from the book a discussion that Dobb recorded in which a personoid philosopher, ADAN. considers what he might owe his (unknown) creator. It is clear that this personoid believes he has free will (and so can say, "non serviam", i.e. I choose not to serve). It closes by quoting Dobb's expressed dilemma in having to eventually bring this world to an end.
- The New Cosmogony: review of a fictional oration by a Nobel Prize laureate, who presents a new model of the universe based on his analysis to the Fermi Paradox: the universe is a game.
Opinions about "A Perfect Vacuum"
- "Lem is Harpo Marx and Franz Kafka and Isaac Asimov rolled up into one and down the white rabbit's hole." (The Detroit News) [1]
- "[Lem is] a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age, who plays in earnest with every concept of philosophy and physics, from free will to probability theory." (The New York Times) [2]
- "One of the most intelligent, erudite and comic writers working today." Anthony Burgess (The Observer) [3]
"Imaginary Magnitude"
In 1973 Lem wrote a book Imaginary Magnitude (Polish: Wielkość Urojona), a collection of introductions to nonexistent books, as written by artificial intelligences. One of those Lem eventually developed into a book by itself: Golem XIV is a lengthy essay on the nature of intelligence, delivered by the eponymous US military computer.
"Provocation" and "One Human Minute"
Provocation (Prowokacja, 1984) contains two faux reviews:
- "Provocation", for a faux book by Horst Aspernicus: Der Völkermord. I. Die Endlösung als Erlösung. II. Fremdkörper Tod, Getynga 1980
- "One Minute", for a faux book by J. Johnson and S. Johnson: One human minute, Moon Publishers, London - Mare Imbrium - New York 1985. The book is alleged to be a collection of statistical tables, a compilation that includes everything that happens to human life on the planet within any given 60 second period.
One Human Minute or Library of 21st Century (Biblioteka XXI wieku, 1986) contains three faux reviews,
- Das kreative Vernichtungsprinzip. The World as Holocaust
- Weapon Systems of The Twenty First Century or The Upside-down Evolution
- "One Minute", the same as in the Provocation
In 2009 the Hungarian film director Pater Sparrow released an award-winning film 1, based on One Human Minute.
Bibliography
- Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum, Northwestern University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8101-1733-9
