SOURCE: “The Quest for Art: Lem's Analysis of Borges,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 29, No. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 53–64.

[In the following essay, Davis discusses Lem's literary criticism and views on Jorge Louis Borges, presented in the essay “Unitas Oppositorum: The Prose of Jorge Louis Borges.”]

As a critic, Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem is anything but worshipful. Having, as he does, a belief that the purpose of contemporary criticism is to improve the future works of the author in question, he is never satisfied with merely praising a writer. One often has the impression he is embarrassed at making laudatory remarks and is quick to get on to the “meat” of his comments—the pointing out of structural or logical weaknesses. However, to have one's faults specifically pointed out by the august Lem is, in fact, great praise, since he regards inferior writers as beneath his contempt. While many critics build their reputations on annihilating the ridiculous and the mundane, Lem considers bombarding the literarily defenseless a waste of time and will only analyze those particular authors whose works evince his admiration. His famous attacks upon the general state of science fiction writing, for example, rarely target specific bad writers but instead become more like rolling barrages, threatening an entire position and causing personalities who might otherwise have little in common to unify in their outrage.

One can, therefore, learn a great deal about Lem's aesthetic intentions from his criticism of other authors. When he praises an author, he tempers his words. When he disapproves of aspects of particular works, he is usually expressing admiration for these works as a whole. The indefinite areas in which most writers instinctively make their aesthetic choices are thereby revealed to the reader of Lem's criticism more clearly than is possible with many fiction writers. An example of this clarity may be found in his commentary on the stories of the late Jorge Luis Borges. Lem's analysis is interesting not only for its insights into the methodology of Borges and for its revelations about Lem's attitude towards the creation of fiction, but also because it is one of his few essays presently available about an author who is not usually classified as a science fiction writer. Though many elements in Borges's works are much like those in works of science fiction and fantasy, in common practice the Argentine writer is usually given an apartment among the “serious” or “literary” writers, in a classier neighborhood than that allowed to the Delanys, Herberts, or Farmers of science fiction.¹ Lem himself opposes such arbitrary hierarchical distinctions between various genres of fiction, believing it causes a ghettoization of writing that invites diminished expectations of anything called science fiction. In the essay “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case—With Exceptions,” he has pointed out that these categories did not exist for Karel Capek and H. G. Wells but were later used to minimize Olaf Stapledon's achievement (49). Fiction should be judged as fiction, strictly on a qualitative basis, and science fiction should neither be elevated nor excused for its failures to adhere to the common values of literature. Lem has written: “A theory of literature either embraces all works or it is no theory” (“Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature” 232). Therefore, he demands as much of a story about men on Mars as he does one about a prince of Denmark, and vice versa. Borges gets no special treatment because he is a “serious” writer. Writing is judged on other bases.

At the beginning of “Unitas Oppositorum: The Prose of Jorge Luis Borges”² Lem admits that his essay will be a subjective one, and the train of thought is initially not as clear as it is later in the essay. He says he feels close to Borges's work, though it is foreign to him because Borges falls into some of the traps Lem knows from experience and because he “cannot always approve of his literary methods” (233). One wishes at this point for explicit examples of these “traps” from Lem's own works to compare with the faults he finds in Borges, but he drops this point for the moment and proceeds to list what he considers to be Borges's best stories: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Pierre Menard—Author of Don Quixote,” “The Lottery in Babylon,” and “Three Versions of Judas”: “each of the stories mentioned has a double-decker, perverse, but logically perfect structure. … In each story we can find the same kind of method: Borges transforms a firmly established part of some cultural system by means of the terms of the system itself (234–35).

There is, perhaps, no better definition of the term “Borgesian” than Lem's words. When a writer disregards the usual conventions of realism and substitutes a fantasy world with a rigorously logical structure and crystal-clear prose that leads to paradox and mystery, he or she will inevitably be dubbed “Borgesian,” as Lem has frequently been dubbed, and one does not have to look far to find Borgesian stories by Lem. The first three stories of “Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy”³ most notably have these qualities. Each is rigorously logical, clear and straightforward, yet they close in on themselves, creating paradox and mystery. “I,” for example, tells of Tichy's encounter with a Professor Corcoran who has created electronic minds which experience a “reality” fed to them through a series of magnetic tapes. The minds thus fall in love, see beautiful sunsets, even “feel” their bodies. In short, they live in a universe created by Corcoran. Limited by their senses, they may sometimes question the reality of their existences, but they have no more way of knowing that they are machines in metal boxes than would any human being who was experiencing life. We cannot “feel” our own brains. Only that which is perceived can be known, and it is this Berkeleyan note on which the story ends.⁴ Corcoran, the creator of universes for his electric minds, speculates that he may himself live in a universe made up of impulses fed to him by another creator. This story strongly resembles Borges's “The Circular Ruins” in which a man creates another man by dreaming, then discovers that he, too, is the creation of someone's dream. One is also reminded of Borges's “Everything and Nothing” in which the dead Shakespeare is told by God: “I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and no one” (117).

In “II” Tichy encounters Decantor who has captured his wife's “soul” in a crystal, thus granting her immortality, the thing which humans most desire. Tichy, however, buys, then destroys the crystal, because the wife's consciousness exists in a void, a void far more dreadful (because of its loneliness) than oblivion. One is reminded of Borges's “The Immortal,” in which mortality brings a desire to be immortal, but immortality brings the corresponding desire to be mortal. In “III” Tichy encounters yet another quirky inventor, Zazul, who has created a duplicate of himself. At the end of the story, however, Tichy discovers that the Zazul to whom he is speaking is the duplicate, not the original. In each of these Tichy reminiscences, the inexorable juggernaut of logic curves the plotline in on itself until the circle closes, cleanly, simply, and very much in the manner of Borges.

In each of the “Further Reminiscences” one also sees another quality commonly seen in Borges: the writer winking over the edifice of his work to remind the reader that, no matter how convincing the story may become, it is always an artifice. The fiction is manipulated and shaped by its creator. Its relation to the “real” world (a world called into question by many modern thinkers, but particularly by physicists) extends only as far as it is necessary to involve the reader in the story.⁵ Whatever the “real” world may be is irrelevant as long as the world of the story is internally consistent. Both writers occasionally, deliberately, remind us of the puppeteer who holds the characters’ strings. In “I,” for example, it is hinted that just as Corcoran and Tichy are the products of Lem's imagination and shaping, the readers may be the product of an author unknown to them, and just as Corcoran and Tichy are unaware of Lem, any mind must be unable to comprehend its creators. The situation of a literary character is therefore analogous to that of the minds in electrical boxes. When Zazul creates a duplicate of a human being, the act is analogous to authors’ creating characters out of a few well-placed nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Every writer, whether deliberately emphasizing the metafictional aspect of writing or attempting to create fictional worlds which seem identical to the “real,” is aware of the role of creator, but not all writers wish to amuse the reader by flaunting the writer in the process of creation as do Henry Fielding, André Gide, John Barth, or Vladimir Nabokov. In Borges more often than Lem, one is nearly always aware of the storyteller's presence; his powerful voice resonates throughout his works. His tales are too logical, too precise; they too cleanly close their circular structures. One cannot help admire the artifice and feel the same sense of classical beauty one gets from Corneille, Pope, David, or Canova. The execution of the artwork within the limitations of a preexisting concept becomes as admirable as the concept, or feeling, that motivated it or that it is supposed to evoke.

Lem, however, does not always take the metafictional approach. One is aware of the writer as artificer, for example, in his novel The Investigation (1959), the stories of The Cyberiad (1967), and the experimental works Imaginary Magnitude (1973) and A Perfect Vacuum (1971), but the stories of Pirx the Pilot are notably convincing as realism, generally confining themselves to the credible and keeping the author hidden, as does Solaris (1961) and The Invincible (1964). Lem's protean range is one of his greatest assets. One never knows exactly what to expect from him. It is possible to develop a very precise idea of what is meant by Proustian, Dickensian, Kafkaesque, and Borgesian, but “Lemian” would include such diverse works as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), His Master's Voice (1969), The Futurological Congress (1971), and A Perfect Vacuum, making the term not nearly as specific as it might be.

In fact, it is Borges's consistency that Lem eventually criticizes in his “Unitas Oppositorum”: “Seen as a whole, his work is a universe of literature whose secondary, repetitious aspects diminish and slight his best efforts by their very neighborhood, because these aspects structurally debunk his best work” (238). Borges, in other words, uses the same method to create each of his fictions. Individually, writes Lem, the stories show

… such an intellectual power that they do not lose impact even after many rereadings. If at all, they are lessened only when one reads all of his stories at a sitting. … It is always dangerous, even fatal for the creator, when we see the invariant (debunking) structure, the algorithm of his creative power. God is a total mystery to us above all because it is on principle impossible for us—and will remain impossible for us—to understand or imitate the structure of God's act of creation.

(239)

The familiar analogy between the creator of a work of art and the creator of the universe is blatant in this quote—a fiction writer is like God because he or she creates worlds, people, and things—and one cannot really dispute an analogy, since it is by definition an inexact comparison. However, the conclusion that Lem derives from it is highly disputable, based as it is on the analogy. Why is it dangerous, even fatal, for the algorithm of creative power to be revealed? If one reads Aristotle, for example, and comes to learn the structure of Greek tragedy, one will not necessarily be unable to relish a newly discovered tragedy or be unable to be deeply affected by it. One will simply be given another, more analytical tool for analyzing the work. To argue that revealing the algorithm of creative power is fatal is akin to students naively arguing that the analysis of poetry decreases the pleasure of it, or, as many popular commentators have argued, that the increase of scientific understanding caused the modern decrease in religious faith, ignoring the array of social and political forces which have contributed more largely to it. Knowing how a thing works will not necessarily make it uninteresting, and one hopes Lem is not arguing along these simple lines, yet the “structure of God's act of creation” is ambiguous enough to allow such a meaning. Perhaps the largest ambiguity in the statement is “God.” What the term means to Lem could be religiously traditional or extraordinarily idiosyncratic, and one simply cannot know, given presently available information.

What Lem finds weak in Borges could easily be argued to be a strength, however, if one looks at the repetition of structure in a different way. Throughout the modern period (and by this I mean from at least the eighteenth century), the dichotomy of the classical opposed to the romantic has been useful in analyzing art. Some have even argued that the attitudes implicit in the terms have existed since ancient times—the romantic, for example, in Plato's Ion; the classical in Longinus—through the terms themselves are recent, both being used first in this way by Madame de Staël in 1810.⁶ The opposing directions these terms represent must be grappled with by each generation of writers in determining the aesthetic stance of their works. Classicists choose to look to the models of the past and use the elements which have most effectively been used to create art. Romantics search for new forms to express that which they feel the models of the past are incapable of expressing. Classicists emphasize purity of form; romantics, novelty. Romantics quest to create the new; classicists feel the genuinely new is impossible and attempt to express eternal verities. Romantics value the irrational; classicists seek pure reason.

These attitudes should not be too precisely defined except as they apply to specific groups in specific time periods, yet they are extremely useful general concepts in studying art of all sorts and can effectively be applied to Lem's analysis of Borges. Lem disapproves of Borges's “mechanistic sickness” because his attitude to the creation of art is strongly tinged with certain romantic attitudes, whereas Borges's work is more classical. This seems a curious idea at first. There is no one writing today who values logic and rationality more than Lem. His attacks on the illogic of various time-travel plots and apocalypse tales are rapier-like and incisive. The adjective “antediluvian” was applied to Lem by his translator Michael Kandel in linking him to Enlightenment authors because of his wide interests and rational arrogance (vii-xi). Only such arrogance would allow Lem to have set out on the monumental task of creating an entirely new theory of literary criticism in Fantastyka i futurologia (1971)—a task akin to Samuel Johnson's setting out to write the English dictionary by himself. The systematic thinking of the classicist is valued more highly by Lem than the mystic lucubrations of the romantic. Yet, fundamentally, Lem uses his intellectual, rational analyses in quest of the new. A new age merits new forms in Lem's thinking; the old forms cannot completely elucidate our situation.

Borges, on the other hand, has always seen writing as rewriting. As Lem points out, Borges spent a good portion of his life as a librarian, and, says Lem, “he has remained one, although the most brilliant manifestation of one” (“Unitas Oppositorium” 240–41). Borges is deeply familiar with numerous past works, including some extraordinarily arcane ones, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. He is therefore very much aware of the wealth of possibilities of form and content in literary history, as obviously Lem and any other significant writers are. Important but ill-read writers are perhaps nonexistent. Yet, the knowledge of all this background can also lead one to the conclusion of Ecclesiastes: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be … and there is no new thing under the sun” (1:7). Borges's biographer and friend Emir Rodriquez Monegal discusses the essay, “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald” and comments, “In writing about the metamorphoses of Omar Khayyam's poems into FitzGerald's, he [Borges] suggests a concept of literature as palimpsest: for him, a literary text is always based on a previous text, and so on and so forth” (85). In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” all works are said to be the work of a single author, timeless and anonymous. Also, in “A New Refutation of Time” the individuality of all things is called into question.

The most famous fictional example of Borges's concept of writing as rewriting is one of the stories Lem praises as the Argentine's best, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.” In it, the title character spends his life in the attempt to write Don Quixote—not a modernized Don Quixote, not one of those tales which places Christ on the boulevard or Don Quixote in New York, but The Don Quixote, line for line, word for word, as Cervantes wrote it. Furthermore, while Menard writes it, he will not attempt to do so by recreating the experiences of Cervantes, because to be a twentieth-century man assuming the role of a seventeenth-century man would be a diminution, besides being impossible. Menard will write the Don Quixote from his own life and experiences. Because of Menard's imperfect memory of the original, the book in Menard's head is little different from any other unwritten book: a collection of fragmentary scenes, themes, and lines.

Taking this fantastic story a step further, the narrator then argues that Menard's Don Quixote is superior to Cervantes's. Having been written by Menard, it has much more irony than Cervantes's. As a seventeenth-century writer, one can suppose Cervantes to accept many ideas that Menard could not; therefore, Menard has added a new level of meaning to the same words. “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer” (52). The narrator analyzes a passage from each work, the words of which are utterly identical, yet Menard was a contemporary of William James, and, therefore, in the reading of Menard, one's understanding of what he has written becomes very different. The story ends with the suggestion that one might read The Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid and find it a totally different work. “Would not the attributing of The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce be a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual counsels?” (55).

The satire of literary criticism in this story is apparent, though its point is one of the most suggestive statements about writing and reading ever postulated. Though the teasing of literary critics and criticism may be rich, the tale is even richer. As Monegal points out, Borges read Don Quixote in English translation before he read it in Spanish. When he did, the original, he thought, seemed like a “bad translation.” Monegal continues:

It would be easy to dismiss this statement as an exercise in paradox. It is better to recognize in it one of the basic tenets of Borges’ poetics: that the reading (not the writing) creates the work. … In imagining a French author who attempts to rewrite Cervantes’ masterpiece in its literal entirety, Borges is not only poking fun at the notion of originality but also proving how much to write is to rewrite (that is, to write once more what has already been written) and to what extent to rewrite is simply to read.

(77–78)

It would seem from Borges's brief meditation “Borges and I” that a writer also engages in a perpetual rewriting of his own works. He writes of trying to escape “the other one,” but flight is futile. What he writes becomes the other one's and each reaching for a new Borges leads back to himself (200–01).

Perhaps in “Unitas Oppositorum” Lem is guilty of dismissing Borges's stories as exercises in paradox, because his attitude towards writing is fundamentally different form Borges. Lem does not seem to accept the concept of writing as rewriting. Works follow other works and aesthetically build upon their forerunners. It is a linear (or Newtonian) conception of time, perhaps naturally arising from Lem's training in science, opposed to Borges's conception of time as a circle. As an example, Lem's description of his development as a writer proposes three phases to his career, with the second and third being clear advances over the previous: “I believe that in the first period of my career I wrote purely secondary things. In the second period (Solaris, The Invincible), I reached the borders of a field that was already nearly completely mapped. In the third period … I left the fields already exploited and broke new ground” (“Reflections on My Life” 18–19). Clearly, the implication is that each stage is a significant improvement over the previous. In a sense, Borges can only perceive writing as the creation of secondary things; there is no breaking of new ground, because ultimately nothing is new. Borges is himself, every other writer who has gone before, and all that will follow.

Lem also ascribes a significant importance to the role of chance in all events. In several of his works (such as The Investigation and The Chain of Chance [1975], he brilliantly turns statistical theory on its head, proving that it makes all things possible, despite the general impression that it proves certain events, such as a car leaking out of a garage, to be impossible. Furthermore, in describing his own life, Lem has always emphasized his feelings on the importance of chance. On its publication in the New Yorker, the essay “Reflections on My Life” was entitled “Chance and Order,” pinpointing the theme he perceived running through his life. Perhaps surviving the arbitrary death meted out by World War II gave him a heightened sense of the ways in which random events bring the best-laid schemes and traditional arrangements into chaos. By comparison, Borges's life has been rather orderly. Even Lem's writing method in his early career, a method he has since abandoned, opened the door to happy coincidence, random discovery, and chance events. Lem used to get an idea for a beginning, then sit down and begin writing spontaneously. Often, he remarks, he found himself in the position of a reader, uncertain what was to come next. Sometimes, he found himself unable to unknot the intricacies of his own developments. Often, when stymied, as he was by the conclusion of Solaris, he put aside the work until the answer to his logical, structural, or aesthetic problem presented itself (“Reflections” 22). In “Unitas Oppositorum,” in fact, he criticizes what he perceives as Borges's unreceptiveness to random invention in the following words: “[H]e pretends to believe (as some humanists do) that a truly brilliant work of art contains no trace of chance, but is indeed the result of some (higher) necessity” (236).

This waiting for illumination by chance reminds one of the Romantic poets who left their windows open in order to allow the Muse, if she were passing, to possess them. The difficulty of losing inspiration in mid-work is common enough among those who rely on such an impulse to execute a large work, and one can easily see why Lem's practical side would make him abandon this way of writing. The history of Romanticism includes incidents like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's inability to complete the great poem “Kubla Khan,” and Balzac's careful avoidance of sex during the writing of a novel because he believed it sapped his inspiration. Yet even when Lem explains why he no longer allows himself to begin without a precise idea of the outcome, he describes the necessity of the change in terms of a metaphor. There is a great reservoir of inspiration within the artist, and after having drained it for a number of years, one must resort to “ever more complicated tricks … to drive the remaining reserves to the surface” (“Reflections” 23). This metaphor of the reservoir within, as well as his earlier faith in the gushing forth of his works, are plainly more romantic in concept than the practical aspect would admit, along with his view of the artist as a kind of explorer, moving forward into the mysteries of the world to understanding, through a series of stages.

Obviously with Borges, there is no going forward. Because of genetics, or education, or the circularity of time, moving forward is an illusion. A writer is condemned to recreate that past, whether it is the past of other writers or of himself, simply because the past and present are indistinguishable. What may appear to be incredibly original proves to be the descendent of previous works. A writer creates his antecedents when he writes, just as surrealists created a collection of “saints” that were not previously associated until Surrealism. Borges once remarked that Hawthorne's story “Wakefield,” (1835) “foreshadows Kafka, but Kafka modifies and sharpens the reading of ‘Wakefield.’ The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his forerunners” (Harss and Dohmann 130). These attitudes are more classical in orientation, though Borges does not so much argue that an earlier time was a golden age of the greatest art and therefore one must emulate it, as much as assert the impossibility of escaping the ages encapsulated in each human being. Transcendence is impossible. When the main character in “The Immortal” achieves immortality, he loses his individuality and becomes all men. When the title character of “Funes the Memorious” receives his photographic memory, he becomes incapable of abstract thought and merely lies in his hut burdened by the “garbage disposal” of his mind. Crushed by the sheer number of his recollections of his own past, he is an extreme example of all humans, but is not qualitatively different in his inability to go beyond the past.

Transcendence, on the other hand, plays a large role in various works by Lem. At the end of Solaris, Kris Kelvin goes down to the great sentient ocean, thrusts his hand into it, and seems to come to a higher level of affinity with, if not understanding of, the alien being. He reaches some plane of unity or communion, though not communication.⁷ At the conclusion of Return from the Stars (1961), Hal Bregg wanders in the mountains until his affinity for the natural world overcomes his feelings of separateness from the Earth, which has changed so much since he left. In The Invincible's last episode, Rohan also reaches a new level of understanding in his walk across the battle-scarred planet. Pirx the Pilot similarly seems to undergo romantic epiphanies when he encounters an alien spacecraft in “Pirx's Tale” or when he watches the evacuation of a damaged spaceship in “The Albatross.”

In the final paragraph of Lem's essay on Borges, he writes “His [Borges's] work, admirable though it may be, is located in its entirety at an opposite pole from the direction of our fate. Even this great master of the logically immaculate paradox cannot ‘alloy’ our world's fate with his own work” (242), and once again the disparity between the two great writers’ attitudes towards literature is manifested. Borges would not have disputed what Lem has written, but he would not have seen the criticism as a liability either. The world's fate has nothing to do with his work. Where we are going, in Borges, is where we have been. That which is perfect, self-contained, and eternal is not of this world, but this world is not the goal of Borges's art. His stories are fine jewels, fascinating for the conflicting images in their reflections. Lem creates mirrors in which we are to see ourselves and the universe. To say Borges fails because the jewels have multiple, conflicting reflections is an error. In a way, Borges is Decantor in Lem's “Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy: II,” while Lem is Tichy. Borges creates an eternal perfection, the soul within a crystal, but Lem sees that perfection as sterile and inhuman. With “Unitas Oppositorum” he sets out to smash the crystal and in doing so, besides giving a new perspective on Borges, reveals much about the motivations and conceptions behind his art. Neither writer, it must be emphasized, can properly be classified simply as a Romantic or a Classicist in the narrowest sense of the terms. Both are of this time and any strict appropriation of either a Classical or Romantic aesthetic would be as ironic as Cervantes's words coming from Pierre Menard. Neither the Pole nor the Argentine has done so. However, in the particular ways discussed above, certain underlying assumptions of Classical and Romantic values are clearly present and help increase an understanding of both writers’ works.

Notes

1. Lem uses the terms “Upper Realm” or “Realm of Mainstream Literature” for “literary” or “serious” fiction and “Lower Realm” or “Realm of Trivial Literature” for Westerns, mysteries, sports novels, etc. He places Borges among mainstream authors, but writes that science fiction may inhabit both realms (obviously based upon his appreciation of a small number of superior science fiction works, since he regards most science fiction as “Lower Realm”). The distinction, however, is made after the fact, not before. Any work of any genre might be “Upper Realm” depending on how it is written. Categorization before the fact, he says, encourages some writers to rely on the genre as an excuse for banality (“Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case—with Exceptions” 47–48).

2. An excellent essay which also explores the implications of Lem's discussion of Borges is Dagmar Barnouw's.

3. Lem can be as critical with himself as with other writers, as, for example, in his appraisal of Return from the Stars as a “poor book.” It is worth remarking, therefore, that while criticizing Borges, he holds little regard for his own Tichy stories, which are, in all fairness, quite uneven, having been written over the long period of Lem's evolution as a writer. Perhaps the faults he sees in them are exactly what he finds flawed in Borges. Nonetheless, the “Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy: I–V” are among Lem's finest short stories, whether he holds them in contempt or not. Only the first three are discussed here because they are the most comparable, in my opinion, to the stories of Borges. “IV” seems less Borgesian, and “V, The Washing Machine Tragedy” strikes me as being not Borgesian. This is not to say that “IV” and “V” are inferior.

4. Both Lem and Borges have been strongly influenced by the Idealist philosophies of Berkeley, Hume, and Locke, but especially Berkeley. Lem even wrote his Dialogi in the same form as Berkeley's Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Borges's reading of the Idealists is documented in Monegal (170, 172, passim).

5. When Lem discusses Kafka briefly in “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction,” he states “What meaningful and total relationships obtain between the telegram ‘Mother died, funeral Monday’ and the structure and function of the telegraphic apparatus? None. The apparatus merely enables us to transmit the message, which is also the case with semantically dense objects of a fantastic nature, such as the metamorphosis of man into bug, that nevertheless transmit a realistic communication.” The “apparatus” or story, therefore, can violate conventional reality as long as it is carrying a real world meaning: “Even when the happenings … are totally impossible, a science-fiction work may still point out meaningful, indeed rational, problems” (36–37).

6. The application of the terms romanticism and classicism to ancient theories of art may be yet another proof of Borges's view (to be discussed later) that writers create lineages that would not exist without the subsequent writers (Harss and Dohmann 130).

7. In asserting the presence of transcendent experiences in Lem's works, I am aware of his statement, “In science fiction there can be no inexplicable marvels, no transcendences, no devils or demons …” (“On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction” 35). Plainly, there are no “transcendences” in this sense in Solaris, and others. Lem means an event outside the verifiable, rational order in the external world. I intend the word to mean a level of understanding or knowledge deriving from a nonempirical mental experience. That a mind should, as Nabokov wrote, know more than it can express in words is not a violation of the physical universe.

Works Cited

Barnouw, Dagmar. “Science Fiction as a Model for Probabilistic Worlds: Stanislaw Lem's Fantastic Empiricism.” Science-Fiction Studies 6 (1978): 153–63.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Borges and I.” Trans. Anthony Kerrigan. A Personal Anthology. 200–201.

———. “The Circular Ruins.” Trans. Anthony Bonner. Ficciones. 57–63.

———. “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald.” Trans. Alastair Reid. A Personal Anthology. 93–96.

———. “Everything and Nothing.” Trans. Kerrigan. A Personal Anthology. 115–17.

———. Ficciones. Ed. Kerrigan. New York: Grove, 1962.

———. “Funes the Memorious.” Trans. Kerrigan. Ficciones. 107–16.

———. “A New Refutation of Time.” Trans. Kerrigan. A Personal Anthology. 44–64.

———. A Personal Anthology. Ed. Kerrigan. New York: Grove, 1967.

———. “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.” Trans. Bonner. Ficciones. 45–55.

———. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertium.” Trans. Reid. Ficciones. 17–36.

Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. “Jorge Luis Borges, or the Consolation of Philosophy.” Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. 102–36.

Kandel, Michael. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Thing Antediluvian.” Introduction. The Cosmic Carnival of Stanislaw Lem. New York: Continuum, 1981.

Lem, Stanislaw. “The Albatross.” Trans. Louis Iribarne. Tales of Pirx the Pilot. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. 140–56.

———. “Chance and Order.” Trans. Franz Rottensteiner. New Yorker 30 Jan. 1984: 88–98. Rpt. as “Reflections on My Life.” Microworlds. Ed. Rottensteiner. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. 1–30.

———. Dialogi. Krakow: Literackie, 1957 and 1972.

———. “Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy: I–V.” Trans. Joel Stern and Maria Swiecicka-Ziemanek. Memoirs of a Space Traveler. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. 33–110.

———. “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction.” Trans. Franz Rottensteiner and Bruce R. Gillespie with R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin. Microworlds. 31–44.

———. “Pirx's Tale.” Trans. Louis Iribarne and Magdalena Majcherczyk. More Tales of Pirx the Pilot. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. 3–20.

———. “Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature.” Trans. Robert Abernathy. Microworlds. 209–32.

———. “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case—With Exceptions.” Trans. Werner Koopman. Microworlds. 45–105.

———. “Unitas Oppositorum: The Prose of Jorge Luis Borges.” Trans. Rottensteiner. Microworlds. 233–42.

Monegal, Emir Rodriguez. Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography. New York: Dutton, 1978.