[In the following essay, Rodnianskaia examines Lem's literary approach and philosophical perspective in his novel His Master's Voice, particularly Lem's “philosophy of chance” and issues surrounding the role of scientific inquiry.]

A collection of works by Stanislaw Lem has been published by Mir. In addition to the cycle of stories about the space travels of the navigator Pirx, already quite familiar to Soviet readers, the volume includes the novel His Master's Voice, one of this intelligent, sophisticated, and controversial writer's most complex works. It is on this novel of Lem's that I intend to focus, particularly on the argument it contains between the “poet” who firmly believes, in [Aleksandr] Blok's apt phrase, in “beginnings and ends to everything,” and the “anti-poet” convinced that “chance lies in wait for everyone.” In Lem's book, this conflict is transformed from an external polemical argument into an unresolved inner dialogue.¹

The plot structure of His Master's Voice places it in the familiar category of SF [science fiction] pamphleteering; it is yet another warning to unfortunate humankind. Its acerbic logic and semi-documentary meticulousness make it one of the best works of this genre. However, it belongs “surreptitiously” to an entirely different sphere of literature.

The novel is written in the form of a manuscript from the archive of an American scholar. The manuscript is both related to contemporary events and a part of the author's broader philosophical endeavor; it appears that the novel balances deliberately and precariously on the verge of being a scholarly treatise. It may even appear that the intrigue of the plot (whose intensity is rather misleading) is merely a didactic device for the presentation of bold hypotheses, a bait for the reader who otherwise would not be willing to digest the somewhat dry offering of planetary-futurological-cosmological generalizations. However, the situation is precisely the opposite: the hero's mind, seemingly lost in the sphere of great numbers and statistical averages, is in fact absorbed by its own fate in the world and turns every extraneous problem into a means for tragic self-expression. The “romantic” music is perceived through a barely audible accompaniment; numerous seemingly accidental confessions, arbitrary associations, and apparently passing remarks by the narrator (initially to facilitate the “take-off” and in the end to wrap up his thoughts) come together at one experiential center—the ambivalent human consciousness.

The action of the novel takes place in the US in the 1960s. A famous professor, the mathematician Hogarth, is invited to participate in a highly secret mission, the “Master's Voice Project.” The elite of the scientific world is attempting to decode an alien message, not to develop a new superweapon (a project which these basically respectable scientists would avoid). Humanity, however, does not succeed in reading the “letter” sent by the advanced cosmic “Mind.” It fails because the contemporary world is split into different political systems and has not overcome hatred and suspicion. The world is not yet ready for “Contact”; hence, as Professor Hogarth, in his desire to relate the true story of the project, puts it: the “attempt to hide and imprison a thing that has been filling the abyss of the Universe for millions of years, in order to extract, as if from lemon pits, information packed with fatal power” was “doomed … to insanity”; “if this was not madness, there is not and never will be madness” (17:197).²

The scientists are able to determine that the alien signal is not only a “word” but a “deed,” not simply a coded message but a catalyst assisting in the creation of living matter. However, the inferno of the labs where the scientists try to model the signal produces a plasma-like substance capable of annihilating the Earth instead of creating the “building blocks of life.” This substance, called “Frogs’ Eggs” and “The Lord of the Flies” (names which fuse familiar jokes of the physicists with “satanic” rites of ancient Babylon), is described in the novel with the nightmarish immediacy of Lem's SF demonology of Solaris, “Lymphater's Formula,”³ and Eden.

The attempt by Hogarth and two of his friends to sabotage the project at this critical stage is bitterly farcical. The only thing they accomplish is that they are the first to understand the inescapability of the Apocalypse, whereupon they celebrate the impending inexorable destruction of the world by drinking themselves senseless in their comfortable cages. …

When Lem in an interview called His Master's Voice “realistic” rather than fantastic, he was presumably referring to the primary global conflict parabolically figured in it. Nor are the grounds for such an interpretation exhausted by Lem's view of the problem of contact with alien civilizations as a real and pertinent issue for contemporary science. (Contrary to Ray Bradbury, for example, for whom the problem of contact is a convention of SF grotesque, Lem is a convinced believer in the hypothesis of the inhabited universe.) The action of His Master's Voice does not take place in the future or in a vaguely generalized present (as is characteristic of most anti-utopias). It takes place “today”; the time of the action is simultaneous with the writing of the manuscript (completed in 1967). The novel is intimately grounded in the context of American life. The reader sees the American war industry in the aftermath of the sad affair of the Manhattan Project and the Oppenheimer case. This aspect of the novel presents a fictitious but realistically plausible parallel to the history of nuclear arms. In the scenes describing the meetings of the project's participants with the Senator who comes to “sound out” the scientists, the socio-political side of the conflict comes to the surface. It becomes clear that this master and “benefactor” of the project, even though not a “hawk” dreaming about the expedient use of the weapons of total destruction, thinks exclusively within the framework of the status quo and “spontaneously” views his administration as the unshakeable norm.

That Lem's novel does not offer distinct and straightforward sociopolitical interpretations is clear from the very choice of narrator, who states: “I was one of them. This is the story of an ant” (1:27). However, there is one thing Hogarth and his colleagues understand clearly: “Politics views the globe … as a chess board for contests” (11:123–24), whereas “the idea of seeing to the welfare of the species should have been written on the standard” (11:127). In the contemporary world the very name of the project—Master's Voice—sounds ambiguous to the hero: “to which master are we to listen, the one from the stars or the one in Washington?” (9:115).

Lem makes the question of the “scientist's responsibility” even more complex by using a fantastic motif, related to the special and unexpected nature of the new discovery (even when compared, for example, to the splitting of the atom). In Lem's own terms, his would-be political pamphlet turns into an “epistemological” study, and it is here that the tragic guilt and failure of the scientists do not readily fit into the simplified categories of “conformism” or “political short-sightedness.” The participants of the project did not set out to acquire potentially disastrous information from the cosmic “letter” (this distinguishes the fictional account from the real Manhattan Project). Furthermore, the problem they encounter is unfamiliar to natural scientists: they must decode the workings of an alien mind rather than of natural phenomena. The scientists do not have to answer the traditional question “why?” as it pertains to the anonymous and morally indifferent cause of a phenomenon; instead, they try to find answers to the question “for what purpose?,” which is “out of bounds” for contemporary positivism. A purpose presupposes a determined will, and the scientists have to turn to themselves for answers, since Homo sapiens does not have a referent for comparison beyond its own consciousness. As the scientists try to read the alien signal, they involuntarily impart the elements of their own human world to their research: their passions, troubles, enmities, suffering, and ambitions, even the will of their masters, whom they do not want to serve, and the whole miasmic political and spiritual climate of their world. Even the conscious effort of the human conscience to preserve cognitive thought from moral distortion, which seems involuntarily to create monstrosities, fails in the last stages of the project.

The end of the world does not take place, thanks solely to the “universal prescience” of the alien “Mind”: all attempts to turn the “Frogs’ Eggs” into a weapon of mass destruction are unsuccessful. According to Professor Hogarth, the “Message” is safely protected from its abuse by “inferior” civilizations. The impossibility of distorting or decoding the signal affirms the hero's belief that the signal does not belong to the manifestations of “indifferent Nature.” Otherwise, humanity, capable of transforming any elemental force into a force of destruction, would have succeeded in this case as well. His belief in the benevolence of the alien mind assuages Professor Hogarth's misanthropy. In nature and in human history, life is inseparable from death. However, the senders of the alien message were able to separate life from death and to fill the Silence of the Universe with the life-giving force. Hogarth yearns for the sublime and, unable to find it on Earth, desperately searches for it in the celestial world. In the solitude of his inner world, the hero stubbornly retains his belief in the “Senders” and their faultless ethics. At the same time, his beliefs have “no practical consequences; I am as I was before entering the Project. Nothing has changed” (17:198).

It is true that something remains unaltered and unshaken in Hogarth's soul. In spite of his consoling “unscientific” indulgence, a sense of the inexorable bitterness of personal life is still with the hero. On the last page of the novel, one can hear a lonely human voice in space, incongruous with the “universal” problems.

I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. … What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them and suffer for them? … If from every unfortunate, every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance of the generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.

(17:198–99)

On this piercing note Hogarth's voice breaks and the narration shifts to the fatalism of the ancients expressed in Swinburne's lines:

I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
From too much love of living,
                    From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
                    Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
                    Winds somewhere safe to sea.(4)

After the short-lived optimism and belief in the higher wisdom of the “Senders of the Message,” this conclusion to the novel is unexpected.

Yet the reader is not completely unprepared for this vague lament expressed in the form of a stoic ode to “evolution.” Hogarth's concluding scream is gradually but ineluctably anticipated by something that does not fit into the topical plot of the novel or its cosmological hypotheses. Hogarth's unkind power of observation, his habit of mocking the futility of human instincts (for example, the ineradicable instinct for self-preservation that Hogarth observes in his friend, the famous scientist Rappaport, who is a refugee and a former prisoner), are there to express a hidden theme.

Here it is necessary to note the differences between His Master's Voice and Lem's other SF works. Perhaps for the first time with this novel, Lem is able to find his own voice, his own, not particularly consoling, manner of expressing the inner meaning of human life. The hero of Lem's other novels, even his brilliant Solaris, is a persona who is created quite skillfully but always within the limits of a given role: he is an intellectual with the bearing of a Hemingway hero, or a “knight of space.” By the same token, it was not in conventional SF but in the bold experimental grotesque of The Star Diaries in the philosophical essays of Summa Technologiae, and in the lyrical and philosophical memoirs of Highcastle that Lem forged his personal style. That style combines old-fashioned deliberateness with a rough, almost frivolous sarcasm. It is pseudo-scholarly, because each of Lem's new and refined terms is a concise myth in itself. For example, he calls a kiss an “oral coincidence” and at the same time tries to argue that the charm and essence of a mind are in themselves an alluring fiction.

In His Master's Voice, Lem combines this truly original style with a romantic task when he chooses a narrator who in his age, status, and intellect is very close to the author himself. Of course, Professor Hogarth is not merely a cardboard figure or a conventional pseudonym for Lem, the philosopher, essayist, and thinker. Yet the closer the reader comes to the lyrical core of the novel, the closer Hogarth's voice is to the voice of Lem.

One constant mood, or a single philosophical theme, is important here. This theme, pertaining to what Lem terms the “philosophy of chance,” refers to the human perception of the world and is the lyrical, musical motif of the novel. In his article on [Mann's] Doctor Faustus, Lem “establishes the guilt” of almost all art for bringing into the world an “excess of order” which the world lacks in reality. In His Master's Voice, it seems that Lem attempts to resolve on his own the conflict he discovers in art; according to Lem, chance is the real progenitor of the most important events of the narrative. The alien signal is first detected by two unsavory figures: one of them tries to use the recording of the signal for some prosaic lottery; the other is accidentally destroyed by its sensation, the true meaning of which he does not understand. A cheap newspaper, which publishes a lurid story about the alien “Voice,” decides the subsequent fate of this discovery: the paper is found in a subway by a prominent scientist who, in a heated and fortuitous argument with a friend, sets out to refute the ridiculous and “pseudo-scientific” claims of the newspaper. The narrative is careful to insulate the particular story of the discovery and the fate of the people drawn into it from all bathos, fatalism, or determinism. Hogarth stubbornly accompanies his story with such comments as “statistical whim,” “accidental shift of events,” “a chain of coincidences.” To this list of allusions to the rule of chance we can add Hogarth's remark on the death of Donald Prothero, the best and most honest participant in the project: “he suffered a statistical deviation in the stream of cellular divisions: cancer” (17:198); it then becomes clear what Lem means when he talks in Highcastle about the “tragic farce of existence.”

It would be wrong to assume any necessity in this “tragic farce,” even in terms of the way the laws of probability operate on individual or isolated beings. Compared with unrealized variants, against a background of the multiplicity of abstractly possible worlds swarming in the head of the “pure” mathematician Hogarth, individual human existence and any given event that takes place—biological evolution, the phenomena of culture and history—appear as purely adventitious combinations of factors, something like the positions of playing cards relative to one another in a shuffled deck. Hogarth is accordingly sympathetic in his assessment of a colleague's book in which the emergence of rational thought and culture is viewed as the result of coincidence mythologized ex post facto by a feeble-minded humanity. Only when Hogarth talks about the benevolence of the alien message is he ready to give up his premises: “That we were unsuccessful [i. e., in using the alien signal to create the weapons of total destruction] can be no accident” (17:193). Hogarth is inconsistent when he entrusts the Earth to the hand of fate and yet is incapable of giving up his cosmic “faith” in chance, his sweet and impractical whim. …

Chance, neutral and indifferent in itself, inexorably acquires the morbid ethical connotations of death, destruction, and decay when refracted in Hogarth's human consciousness. This motif forms another, lyrical, narrative line of the novel; it has its own development and climaxes which do not coincide with the peaks of the “surface” plot about the life-giving qualities of the alien “Voice.” The theme of chance-as-death is apparent in three key episodes of the novel.⁵

In the original, the narrative begins with Hogarth's musings about an unforgettable childhood impression. The hero, a little boy at the time, quietly observes the agonizing torment of his mother, who is dying from a fatal disease. He runs to his room and there, unexpectedly, starts to grimace, giggle, and jump in front of a mirror. The adult Hogarth rationalizes this outrageous incident that is firmly entrenched in his memory. He explains that a child, helpless before the unresponding, inexorable, and absurd power of death, gives up the fight and comes over to the side of that power. This happens because the tricks with which adults “ward off,” rationalize, and sanctify death to include it somehow in the logical pattern of their consciousness, are as yet unavailable to a child. According to Hogarth, this episode was decisive in his fascination with mathematics: the theory of probability helps him to “tame” unruly chance, to “calculate” it, thereby alleviating its impudence, at least within the confines of the speculative mathematical universe.

This “taming,” however, remains incomplete. Unpredictable reality keeps interfering with Hogarth's world. One of his most brilliant works appears as a result of a long argument and competition with a great scholar, Deal Senior, whom Hogarth always perceived as a role model and elderly rival. Then Hogarth meets this man in a shabby supermarket. Deal is an old man with a fixed stare and a shuffling gait. The magic is gone; the ideal scheme of creative competition and the enthusiasm of creative effort now appear to Hogarth as pathetic amusement.

The third episode in this group involves the story of Saul Rappaport, Hogarth's constant interlocutor and spiritual double. According to the chronology of the narrative, Rappaport's story of his escape from the Nazis in occupied Poland is supposed to coincide with the critical moment in the plot, when humanity is on the brink of disaster; however, Lem deliberately places this episode at the beginning of the novel, separating the personal story from the global one. In Rappaport's account of the incident, the German officer who indifferently and with no apparent hatred oversaw Rappaport's intended execution was, to his victim, an embodiment of blind chance. In order to “hold out” somehow and to retain a modicum of self-esteem, Rappaport had to concoct a nonsensical myth about the transferral of his soul into the body of the officer after Rappaport's death. Moments before his death, logic, which had constituted his whole life, had to give way to the irrational, even though his consciousness, confronted with its inevitable demise, was ready to accept anything but the naked law of chance. …

Hogarth's dying mother; Rappaport, the near-victim of an execution; the physically repulsive old rival of the hero—these are all ghosts of Hogarth's memory. They live in a dimension different from that of the alien signal, where there is hope for the survival of life in the universe. Hogarth shuts himself off from these ghosts with the poetic magic of Swinburne's The Garden of Proserpine. For Hogarth the latter's elementary myth of the sleep-inducing charm of death plays the same role as does the primitive myth of metempsychosis for Rappaport, one moment before his expected death.

Hogarth's consciousness is split and undergoes an intellectual torment which the narrator calls “carousel” thinking. The structure of the “philosophy of chance” is not stable; it is swayed by the instinctive pressure of human emotion, and thus, in its turn, fears the judgment of the scholarly mind, which reveals the human emotions to be “illusions.”

Hogarth thinks deeply about the ethical basis of his existence. Here the “carousel” works at full speed. While Hogarth's behavior supports his established reputation as a kind and sympathetic person, he confesses, with a touch of scandalous satisfaction, that he is really a malicious person who is always rather happy when he hears about somebody else's misfortune. Hogarth runs away from this puzzle of inexplicable evil within himself; he employs logical and mathematical formulae to prove that statistically the deviation from a certain ethical “golden mean” in both directions is the most probable condition of the human psyche. Here Hogarth expresses his naïve anger at “humanitarians,” those pretentious ignoramuses who pay no heed to the all-explaining power of his mathematical formulae and continue to cling to the notorious mystery of human being. Yet the hero is entirely unable to penetrate the mystery of his own personality. Why, unhappy with the place allocated to him on the ethical scale, has he tried all his life to liberate himself from evil? Why does he, having danced a dance of death at his mother's death-bed, understand so well “those who decided to help life” and attribute with such confidence life-creative intentions to the faraway alien civilization?

Since Hogarth's ethical ideal and his real thirst for the sublime remain outside his calculations, he is ready to deny any objective meaning to this ideal. In a conciliatory fashion, the hero explains the ideal benevolence of the signal by the remnants of his own puritanical upbringing. Hogarth comes to the conclusion that Rappaport's antithetical hypothesis, about the “cosmic genocide” devised by the “Senders of the Letter,” is the result of the psychological experiences of a refugee and exile. In a statement filled with irony, the tired Hogarth finally remarks: “Thus concludes every attempt at transcendence” (13:163). The inadequacy of “carousel” thinking, when a positive anchor is lost every time there is a shortage of “facts,” brings the hero to the Swinburne quotation, the most fruitless of all “transcendental” discourses. …

Lem, however, by no means shares the social pessimism of his hero, who views the fact that the destruction of humanity did not take place this time as but a short reprieve. In his introduction to Summa Technologiae, Lem quarrels with Western futurologists over defeatism of that kind: “When so much creative effort is wasted to forecast our collective death, I do not see any reason not to devote at least part of similar efforts to our future, and still potentially viable, life.” In his novel, Lem gives symbolic dimension to this “chance for life” in the grandiose alien signal; Lem's “earthly” optimism acquires universal proportions. At the same time, his thought, like Hogarth's, is characterized by his agonizing circling around the “philosophy of chance.”

In the sphere of epistemological method, both Lem (judging by his Summa) and his hero Hogarth try to remain Homo faber, the man of scientific and technological lines of action. The “philosophy of chance” in this limited area and from this point of view appears to them as an advantageous approach to life because it simplifies the tasks of the cognitive mind. From then on, the mind is forbidden to ponder the accursed issues of the meaning and laws of life (since they are nothing more than the mythological regulation of chaos); the pragmatic-instrumental approach to this global chaos is viewed as the only fruitful and sober one.

His Master's Voice, however, is not a treatise but a novel, the story of an individual in his social relations and with a sharply personal perception of life; and in it the “philosophy of chance” undergoes a “penetrating” test. The fiction evaluates it not as a philosophy of science but as a “philosophy of life.” Here, when stripped of its scientific, cybernetic, statistical, etc. halo, it becomes a philosophy of the “absurd,” quite familiar to the reader of contemporary literature. This absurd, with its Medusa-like gaze, makes every moral and social effort unviable. (“We are all like snails, each stuck to his own leaf” [17:199].) In the lyrical totality of the novel, the hero's reaction to the absurdity of chance is a tragic expression of non-acceptance and barely perceptible dark hope in the end.

It appears that Lem, the poet, is tired of “smuggling” unexpected beauty and goodness, this “Master's Voice” he can not do without, into the stochastic picture of the world. And Lem, the philosopher, is tired of snaring the “smuggler” in clever traps. That is why this novel is extremely interesting from the point of view of its topical problematics as well as in terms of the ingenious and artistic clarification of the controversial thought of the author.

Notes

1. See, for example, Lem's article on Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus in Novyi Mir, No. 6 (1970).

2. Quotations are from Michael Kandel's translation of Lem's His Master's Voice (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) [ICR].

3. “Formula Lymphater” (“Lymphater's Formula”) was included in Ksiega robotów (The Book of Robots—Warsaw: Iskry, 1961) [FR].

4. “The Garden of Proserpine” in Charles Swinburne's Selected Poems, ed. L. M. Findlay (Carcanet, Manchester: Fyfield Books, 1982), pp. 76, 78. [The conclusion of Lem's book (17:199) includes the one full stanza quoted here, as well as the full subsequent stanza, which Rodnianskaia does not cite; it does not include the two lines that Rodnianskaia quotes from the poem's opening stanza (ICR).]

5. Two of these episodes are for some reason absent from the (abridged) Russian translation of the novel.