SOURCE: “Stanislaw Lem's Star Diaries,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 13, Pt. 3, November, 1986, pp. 361–73.

[In the following essay, Jarzebski examines the development of Lem's philosophical perspective in his Star Diaries stories, drawing attention to Lem's mockery of intellectual arrogance and positivist views of human progress.]

Among Lem's story-cycles, the Star Diaries has a special place. Chronologically, it is the oldest, but the author has continued to develop it up to the present day. Moreover, so far as its tone and problems are concerned, it is the most heterogeneous of Lem's fictions. For these reasons it is worth analyzing in depth.

The first parts of the cycle were published as early as the collection Sezam (1954). It began in a cheerful mood:

The famous star traveller Ijon Tichy, Commander of the Galactic Long Distances, trapper of comets and meteors, the indefatigable discoverer and explorer of eighty thousand and three stellar bodies, doctor honoris causae of the Universities of both Bears, member of the Society for the Protection of Small Planets and many other associations and societies, Knight of the Order of the Milky Way and the Nebulae, manifests himself in his own person in the Star Diaries presented herewith, which places him on an equal footing with such intrepid men of the past as Karl Friedrich Hieronymous von Münchhausen, Lemuel Gulliver and Maître Alkofrybas.

(Sezam, p. 201)¹

This is how Lem introduces his hero in the so-called “Foreword” to the first Star Diaries—which carries the signature of another recurring figure of his later work, Professor Astral Sternu Tarantoga. For the reader in the year 1954, the matter seemed clear: in The Astronauts (1951) Lem was saying serious things, but here he was having fun.

This situation has changed in the course of time. While Lem's early works, for all their solemnity, quickly paled and have been relegated to the category of juvenile fiction, today we can see in the Star Diaries the beginnings of a most serious undertaking, a criticism of the human faculties of cognition.

Obviously, the Star Diaries is a collection of many different styles and objects of parody, to which the author provides a partial key in the just-quoted introduction. The adventures of Ijon Tichy indeed remind the reader of the tall tales of the fabulous liar, Bürger's Baron Münchhausen. The striking thing about both is the thoroughgoing and, as it were, cheerful levity with which they disregard all physical limitations. When Münchhausen wants to go to the Moon, he just plants a Turkish bean and climbs its stalk; in Tichy's cosmos, rampaging wild potatoes attack passing spaceships. At the same time, the worlds in which both fantastic heroes move about are rather “homely.” Münchhausen climbs to the Moon because he accidentally tossed his axe there from the Earth; Tichy visits a star cluster in search of a favorite pocket knife, which he has lost on one of the planets. Neither hero is interested in exploring such worlds; each is instead engaged in quests for the most outlandish and unlikely adventures. Neither of them is changed by his experiences;² for, without exception, those experiences relate, not to those who experience them, but to the person who tells them, so that they all occupy the same temporal level, “happening” at the same time—i. e., when a group of listeners gathers prepared to hear tall tales told.

If the goal of the stories is not to convince anyone that planets like Enteropia, Pinta, or Panta actually exist, and by the same token to test the “humanness” of Tichy in his confrontation with strange “Sunkers” or “Ardrites,” then the center of gravity of the Star Diaries must be located elsewhere, in the construction of the depicted discourses and worlds. Here Lem is closer to Swift than to Bürger. The Star Diaries rely on the model of the philosophical fable insofar as the events and characters presented are clearly just pretexts for proferring critiques of theoretical ideas about the social and cosmic order. In other words, what is essential in the tales happens not to Tichy, but to the inhabitants of the planets he visits.

The hero of the Star Diaries has little to say about himself, and not only because he—like any genuine traveller—sets out to visit distant realms in order to experience and to listen. Perhaps the real reason is that the others are not particularly interested in what he could tell them. They are too preoccupied with their own problems, ideas, and classifications, preoccupied to the point of blindness; for not even the testimony of their senses persuades them to deviate from the beaten track of their thinking. For example, Tichy, almost stupefied by the political speeches at the Organization of the United Planets [“8th Voyage”], next visits a school where the pupils resolutely deny his existence because they trust more in the schematic proofs of their text-books than in the testimony of their own eyes [“22nd Voyage”]; Father Lacymon, the missionary, bemoans the secularization of the Cosmos [ibid.]; the inhabitants of Enteropia offer Tichy a rich variety of their curious pleasures [“14th Voyage”]; etc. While he is visiting alien planets, Tichy is usually abruptly drawn into some local, more often than not annoying, ritual, or at best he is indoctrinated into the dominant world-views. In this way Lem parodies the typical attitude of Earthlings, who claim the status of general truth for quite subjective opinions. Even so, the irony would not cut very deep if that were all there is to The Star Diaries. Hidden in that first book, however, are still other poisons, and the human inclination to embrace illusions that Lem ridicules shows its more gruesome results.

The unhappy Idionts, the Pintans, and the Pantans are victims of a “rational social system” that has been established to make them happy. As far as Pinta is concerned, Lem's tale is nothing but a political satire, obvious to anyone still familiar with the Stalinist system. As for the Idionts, they have become victims of the “antinomy of liberty,” which has been cross-bred with the operational logic of the machine. The most fascinating idea has to do with the constitution of the planet Panta, whose inhabitants must resign their individual identity in favor of the perfection of their social existence.³

Over and above the various versions of individual stories, the true hero of the volume called The Star Diaries is the spirit in search of a formula for defining reality. Now, whether this formula is to be found in a political speech, in a teaching program, or in a theological discourse, in every single case there is a gaping gulf between this formula and the world. Criticism of all systems of thought claiming to be in control of reality becomes a constitutive element of Lem's thought in The Star Diaries—the same applies for the subsequent works. Meanwhile, there is the development of the larger corpus of the Diaries.

First, the author supplements them with the cycle From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy, as well as with some other stories published separately (“Doctor Diagoras,” “The Sanatorium of Dr Vliperdius,” “Let Us Save the Cosmos”). At once, the tone of the cycle changes. Tichy discards the Münchhausen costume and becomes a passive receiver, a witness, a father confessor, mostly to misunderstood geniuses of cybernetic technology. Closest to the early Star Diaries is the parodic “appeal of a conservationist” (“Let Us Save the Cosmos”) and the hilarious “Washing Machine Tragedy,” in which learned lawyers, forced to react to the advance of washing machines in human form by formulating appropriate property laws, suffer all the pains of minds that want to get a hold of reality and define it. This theme—the confusion of the law when it is confronted with new, unforeseen situations that must be categorized somehow—returns in “Przekladaniec” (“Roly Poly”) and other works. Legislation, always limping behind social reality as it does, is usually a source of grotesquely ridiculous inappropriateness in Lem.

“The Washing Machine Tragedy” is interesting for other reasons, too. In this version of the familiar “revolt of the robots,” it is not thinking machines that become disloyal to their creators, but another mechanism altogether, a global one—i. e., the mechanism of capitalist competition. This mechanism suddenly achieves independence, ceases to serve human beings, and functions as a process of unlimited production without a goal. In this case, the battle fought through legal subterfuge becomes a defense of human and social identity against the impersonal, as it were “natural,” bacilli-like spread of artificial gadgets. Behind the humorous peripatetics, therefore, is a content of profound significance. What is a law-giver, seen from this perspective? A parody of the scholar, who also tries to establish the principal laws governing the world. The legislator, however, aims for more. The world defined by his rules is not only supposed to function well; it is also expected to be just, moral, and “humane.” The legislator therefore resembles here a researcher who would demand from atomic particles not only a pragmatic order, but an ethical order also, and would thus try to stop the dynamics of reality in order to force upon it rules determined by human beings, civilization, and history. It is hard to tell what Lem intended when he considered the convolutions of the law, but it is worth keeping this viewpoint in mind as a possible interpretation.

There is also another, hardly less interesting explication of the Star Diaries. Most often they depict problems of a specifically ontological kind, of the sort indicated by a story (not belonging to the Star Diaries although included in Dzienniki gwiazdowe): “Czy pan istnenije, Mr Johns?” If Mr Jones consists only of mechanical prostheses, does he then truly exist as a human being? Who really is the racing car driver that is stitched together from the remains of the victims of a catastrophic automobile crash (in “Przekladaniec”)?⁴ Are the intelligent “washing machines” in human form still mechanisms or already beings who may lay claim to human rights and liberties?

The battle of the barristers takes place in an atmosphere with more than a little of the aura of Grand Guignol. But at its base there is a philosophical problem in the strict sense of the word. The law here tries to decide what is decisive for the essence of an object—its manner of functioning or its material basis—and thus Lem clothes the serious discussions of his Dialogues (1957) in story form. From this perspective, the legal aspects do not appear ridiculous. While cybernetics would like to proceed to the agenda of countering humanistic prejudices by calling a human being a “system” or an “automaton” and by investigating him or her as merely a special case of a complex system of elements and their relationship,⁵ the lawyers through their legal deliberations try timidly to preserve the subjective point of view of the species homo, some supposedly “natural” ethical axioms older and more elementary than all legal paragraphs. This is what makes the battle of the barristers possible in the first place; only because this is so is it possible to speak of a conflict between the spirit and the letter of human laws, whereas such a distinction would make no sense in physics or chemistry.

The Star Diaries’ tales of misunderstood inventors are told in another, quite different tone of voice. Their main subject is the problem of the construction of artificial intelligence or the transfer of human personality to a machine. Lem does not describe closely the “engineering” aspects of these endeavors since he is interested mainly in their philosophical and ethical aspects. An especially sensitive spot in this whole complex of questions seems to be the philosophy of cognition that is being developed by the minds imprisoned in the mechanism. Their creators provide them with the illusion of a physical existence in a world perceived by the senses, but in “reality” this is an artificial world. The intelligent minds imprisoned in the machine have indeed no possibility of learning anything about the nature of their existence; the electrical currents flowing in the electronic apparatus combine for them into the illusion of a “matter” imitating our, or some other, matter—whatever the engineer sets out to achieve. But the currents themselves belong to another ontological level, which cannot be reached.

Lem's machine beings are equipped by their creators with sensuous experience basically in the same way that Berkeley's God supplies human beings with sense impressions. Bishop Berkeley developed his ideas in the early 18th century while working on an essay in optics, whereas Lem considered the situation of a human being who is continually connected to an apparatus that produces sensory impressions and generates the perfect illusion of a non-existent reality (Summa Technologiae). In both cases the starting point is solipsism, or at least a kind of philosophical nightmare that must be defused by humor, since it is hardly possible to tackle it with logical argument. Of course, Lem is no solipsist; his decision for a world-view is set against that standpoint, and he deals a sound drubbing to anyone who wants to liquidate everything which isn't “I.” Here are the ideas of Professor Urlip (in “The Sanatorium of Dr Vliperdius”), who is even more radical in his negation of objective reality than a solipsist:

According to him there is nothing, not even himself. The nothingness of being is perfectly intact. The fact of apparent existence of this and that has no significance whatever, for the argument [for ‘neantics’], in keeping with Ockham's Razor, runs as follows: it would seem that reality, or actuality, exists, and also dream. But the hypothesis of reality is unneeded. So then, dream exists. But a dream demands a dreamer. Now the postulation of someone dreaming is—again—an unnecessary hypothesis, for it sometimes happens that in a dream another dream is dreamed. Thus everything is a dream dreamt by a succeeding dream, and so on to infinity. Now because—and here is the main point—each succeeding dream is less real than the one preceding (a dream borders directly on reality, while a dream dreamed within a dream borders on it indirectly, through the same intermediate dream, and the third through two dreams, and so on)—the upper bound of this series equals zero. Ergo, in the final analysis no one is dreaming and zero is dreamt, ergo only nothingness has existence, in other words there isn't anything.

(Mortal Engines, p. 135)

Lem delights in such chains of paralogisms; but in this case the problem cannot be defused by wit, and it returns in serious form. The reality which closes like a cage around the hero is, by the way, a leitmotif of Lem's work, behind which we must suspect a basic complex of the author.

The Berkeleyan dilemma is presented in its purest and most precise form in the story of “Professor Corcoran's Boxes” (“Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy: I,” in Memoirs of a Space Traveler), where it figures in terms of a collection of electronic brains containing synthetic personalities who are submerged in an illusory reality generated for them. Ostensibly, we have one of those cybernetic legerdemains so common in SF [science fiction]; but the interpretation of the tale leads in this case into an abyss. Corcoran is building his boxes because he is himself possessed by the idea that he is a box rigged up by a demiurge of a higher order and deposited on a shelf in his laboratory. Here we have Berkeley's dilemma in modern form. For the good bishop, God is the ultimate, indivisible reality; the relationship of a creator to its creation is a unique “event.” Corcoran, on the other hand, perceives the world as a hierarchy of boxes: in the last analysis, any of his synthetic humans can build their own boxes within their own world—and so on to infinity. Lem glosses over a series of technical difficulties caused by this idea (quite possibly, the engineer would require godlike powers to provide the machine with all the necessary data), for after all he is hardly interested in the practical aspects of the problem.

Corcoran's remarks about his obsessions experienced already in his childhood echo things in Lem's autobiographical novel, Highcastle (1966), so we may assume that in this story Lem is dealing with quite personal concerns. But which ones? Tichy “decodes” the professor, but his commentary doesn't quite make sense:

But, then, it is also possible that the owner of the dusty laboratory in which WE are boxes on shelves is himself a box, a box built by another, still higher scientist, who has original and fantastic notions … and so on, ad infinitum. Each of these experimenters is God, the creator of a universe in the form of boxes and their fate, and under him he has Adams and Eves, and over him his God, one rung up in the hierarchy. And that's why you've done this, Professor. …”

(Memoirs, p. 50)

It is precisely the end of the argument that is unclear: “and that is why. …” Why?

At this point, the logic of the statement seems cockeyed. Nevertheless, we must try to find out what goal Corcoran had in mind. It is not his aim to get drunk on his “omnipotence.” A human being who is convinced that he is a box has no way to advance into the world of the higher ontological level, and therefore the limitation of his cognitive possibilities is to be found already in the essence of his existence. Of course, he might be a “madman” like one of Corcoran's electronic brains—perhaps underhandedly “enlightened” by his creator—who imagines himself to be a box and sees in the imperfections of the illusory reality defects of the programming machinery and the intellect which had built it. But this attitude damns him to pound his head in vain against the walls of ontological particularity, walls which divide the two worlds from each other forever. This is a version of the “artificial transcendence” suggested by Lem in his Summa Technologiae!

For human beings then, only the way “down” remains: unable to escape from their condition, they can only imitate the act of creation in their own world. It may appear paradoxical, but it follows from Lem's line of thought that in order to take the next step on the way to self-knowledge we must repeat the act of creation and become creator-gods. At the same time, this act of creation will restore our dignity since it is bound up with the burden of ethical responsibility for the things we have created. Bruno Schulz thought the same way when he ascribed creative potency to the “lower beings” and sought the essence of existence in this imitation of the act of God. The world of Schulz, however, is a finite hierarchy: God's creations are “solid and perfect,” those of human beings “bungling,” for they fight against the obstinacy of matter. With Lem, things are different: the hierarchy of boxes is an infinite series, and each of his demiurges is an imperfect being, “crippled” and limited by ignorance. The creation of a world does not require omnipotence and omniscience—this is Lem's solution to the problem of theodicy. In his system of thought, “error” becomes the basis of the world, the core of existence, the motor of change. Chance, the defect, creeps into the evolutionary design. Chaos fights with determinism and the teleological project of existence. Concealed behind the façade of humor—Lem's many jokes about humanity being an ugly by-product of a development of cosmic fauna—there is a very serious meaning. We must keep this in mind when reading the three “Voyages” written later than the bulk of the Star Diaries: “The 18th,” “The 20th,” and “The 21st.”

These works deal mostly with cosmogony and with biological and social evolution. Münchhausen-like fantasy and boasting here lead Tichy to a kind of omnipotence and “godhead.” Tichy does not shy away from a “new creation of the world”—he uses the opportunity to correct all its defects. On one occasion (“The 18th Voyage,” in Memoirs …), he fires against the stream of time a “proto-atom” charged with all the information of the whole future of evolution. On another (“The 20th Voyage,” in Star Diaries), he is the director of an institute that corrects the history of the universe and humanity through time-travel. Here again, instead of all those “errors” that have deviously entered into the development of the species through the accidental mutation of organisms in the wake of cosmic catastrophes and the like, indeterminism and teleology are entangled, only now on a social level: the interference of envious colleagues (Boels E. Bubb, Ast A. Roth) causes Tichy's efforts at improvement to fail, and the world remains as it is—strange, senseless, and riddled with errors. That is the point where the grotesque “Voyages” and the serious “Memoirs” touch. Tichy takes on the burden of world-creating, but he starts out from his own world, and this draws him into the paradoxes of the time-loop and sets in motion his pyrotechnics of absurd wit.

When we compare pieces of the Star Diaries from Lem's different creative periods, we soon recognize their common theme: the presumptuousness of the intellect. To explicate the world in the desired sense, and to make it approach the projections of its noble ideal, the mind constantly generates illusions of a “perfect order” in reality, ceaselessly striving to improve what exists. In the early “Voyages,” such attempts result in a grotesque fiasco; in the “Memoirs,” they oscillate between psychic deviation and crime, and in the long “21st Voyage,” which may in a very specific sense be called the crowning point of the whole cycle, knowledge is directly called the Satanic element of existence.

This must not be misunderstood; after all, Lem is no irrationalist. Quite the contrary! He does hold, however, that reason inevitably needs a base, a sort of Archimedean point, which in itself is not rational. Without such a base, reason becomes a lever that may move anything, but working in directionless space, not oriented within any system of coordinates; in which case, it is no longer possible to achieve and to measure “positive” successes. In this latter case, then, reason merely juggles with masses in an empty space. Such a base, such a stronghold for reason, can be “humankind,” understood as the totality of those characteristics of the Earth's inhabitants which limit their possibilities, whether for all time or only temporarily. These biologically and culturally based characteristics of the species are precisely what define the difference between the aspirations of human beings and their possible realization. This distance—which humanity tries to bridge again and again unsuccessfully—saves it from the loss of identity and, at the same time, from dissolution in the “non-human” sphere of fulfilled wishes. What constitutes the species homo is determined on the one hand by what it cannot do, and on the other by what it may not do because of cultural prohibitions. All attempts to leap over the laws limiting human beings into a realm of freedom ruled only by “pure reason” end in disaster. An example is provided by the history of the planet Dichotica as told in the “21st Voyage.”

Lem uses Dichotica as an example in his discussions of the philosophical and civilizational consequences of technological omnipotence. After achieving absolute freedom in the shaping of their world and, what is more, their own bodies and minds, the inhabitants of Dichotica fall victim to a most gruesome “slavery to freedom.” With a sort of submissive fatalism, the members of a clandestine monastic order of intelligent robots thrown on the refuse heap of the local civilization view the mad antics of the Dichoticans. One of them declares:

Such a society, seen from above, looks like a swarm of insects on a heated stove. At a distance this agony has the aspect of a farce, with those comical leaps from wisdom to stupidity, with the fruits of knowledge used so one can play his stomach like a drum, run on a hundred legs or paper a wall with his brain. When it is possible to duplicate the one you love, there is no more loved one, there is only the mockery of love, and when it is possible to become anyone at all and hold whatever convictions you like, then you are already no one and can hold no convictions.

(Star Diaries, p. 235)

It appears that omnipotence is the least desirable gift for a civilization—and one of the most inhuman attributes of God. But it is exactly through their belief in God that the monks of Dichotica heal the wounds of their souls, caused by their flirtation with omnipotence. It is remarkable that it is exactly this belief in God—which establishes limits to free will and is a renunciation of infinite possibilities—that restores to the monks their dignity.

In reality, this philosophical acte gratuit means the rejection of omnipotence, returning it to God. God appears, once more, as “imperfect,” a crippled figure carrying a burden surpassing His strength. “Belief [Father Memnar says] is the only thing that cannot be taken from a conscious entity, so long as that entity consciously cleaves to it. It is—one might say—completely naked, this faith of ours. We entertain no hopes, make no demands, requests, we count on nothing, we only believe” (Star Diaries, p. 223). The monks therefore have created a prop consisting of nothing but an act of their own free choice, floating in a vacuum that lacks any “rational justification.”

The arrogance of intellect which finally proves to be a destructive power is pushed forward to its utmost limits in the “21st Voyage,” but it also plays a decisive role in other published parts of the Tichy cycle. Futurology turns into such a presumption in The Futurological Congress (1971), in the form of belief in the possibility of a scientific prediction of the future of civilization. Here Lem ironically describes a world in which two antithetically extreme prognoses—the most optimistic and the most pessimistic—have been fulfilled at the same time. By the end of the narrative, the technological paradise of the future turns out to have been a pharmacologically-induced illusion. Waking from that hallucination, Tichy observes how the humankind of the 21st century, numbering almost 100 billion, is forced to subsist in indescribable poverty. On close examination, we can recognize even here a certain variant of “the creator of the worlds” and the “dilemma of the boxes”; for what, we may ask, is “reality” for human beings whose sensory apparatus is continuously controlled by chemical means? Any inhabitant of such a utopia/dystopia becomes, as it were, one of Professor Corcoran's “boxes,” and the distributor of the hallucinogens ascends to the role of a—once again, crippled and morally spurious—creator-god.

In “Professor A. Donda,” the results of intellectual works are treated with such nonchalance that they are robbed of all higher rank. In this story, the theories of an Einstein and the stories in a newspaper are equal in “a physical sense.” All the information accumulated by civilization explodes once a certain “critical mass” has been exceeded, and from this explosion is born a small, impenetrable “baby-cosmos.” Once again creation turns out to be the result of an error, an accident, a curious fluctuation within the informational surplus. The professor himself and his grotesque-comical story provide, by the way, the best illustration of this rule. Donda concludes his remarks with an apologia for error and accident as the driving forces of evolution.

Just consider the evolution of life. Billions of years ago the primal amoebae evolved, didn't they? And what did they know how to do? To reproduce. How? Thanks to the constancy of their heritable characteristics. If their heredity had been truly without error, there would be only amoebae on this globe to this day. What happened? Errors. Biologists call them mutations. But what is mutation if not a blind error? A misunderstanding between the creator-transmitter and the descendant-receiver. In his image, yes … but sloppily! Imprecisely! And because the image deteriorated more and more, the trilobites appeared, then the gigantosaurians, the lizards, the mountain goats, the apes and us. … My dear boy, we have underestimated the historical role of error as a fundamental category of existence. Don't think like a Manichean! According to their school, God creates order and the devil keeps tripping it up. That's not how it is! If I get some tobacco, I'll write the missing last chapter of the book of philosophical thought, and it will be the ontology of Apostasy, a theory of being based on error, for error interferes with error, turns into error, and creates error, until chance turns into the fate of the world.

(Maska, pp. 79–80)

Ijon Tichy's adventures continue with the publication of Wizja Lokalna (“Eyewitness Account” or “The Scene of the Crime,” 1982) and Pokój na Ziemi (“Peace on Earth,” 1984). The Star Diaries and its sequels provide us with an overview of the development of Lem's philosophical convictions over the course of some 30 years. We can see how the author gradually demolishes the conviction that there is “reason in history,” or that God is the epitome of ultimate wisdom; and how, on the other hand, he deviates from the view that it might be possible, step by step, by rational, intellectual reflection, to reach the essence of the world, its functional principles, as if the world were a clock that divulges to us, once it has been taken apart into all its cogs and wheels, the unchanging principles of its construction.

The Star Diaries end in the ruins of the positivist world-view. The cult of facts and the scientific collection of facts lead ultimately to our sitting on an informational garbage heap. The “social organism” tortures its individuals, and it reaches true perfection only when it has turned its citizens into uniform and conflictless disks, as in the “24th Voyage.” And almost as a mockery, the scientific world-view and solid minimalism lead finally straight to solipsism. All of these developments were already immanent in positivist doctrine at the end of the 19th century.

The other philosophical system that Lem places on the rack beside positivism is Hegelianism, with its view that the spirit has priority over the world of material things or that the State has priority over the Individual. It is not hard to guess what Lem finds offensive about the two doctrines. When he was a young writer, political propaganda used a popular version of Marxism, essentially a kind of philosophical Volapuk, built from a conglomeration of fragments of the systems of the 19th century. Among them Hegelianism was most prominent, since it justified best the priority of the government over the individual and the discrepancy between the supposed “laws of historical development” and the everyday experience of the individual. As for positivism, this philosophy has been brought up again as the most progressive tradition in Polish literature, and this regrettably also has its influence on traditional ideas about the nature of scientific theorizing. In the first two of Lem's novels, The Astronauts and The Magellan Nebula (1955), the influence of these doctrines, and the naïvely optimistic ideas of progress irrevocably connected with them, is clearly visible. In the course of many years Lem rid himself of these views with obvious passion.

Mockery about the presumptions of reason which construct “a model for the cosmos” should come as no surprise from an admirer of Schopenhauer. After all, that German philosopher had, in his struggle with Hegel, formulated a philosophy of radical empiricism. He based thinking on experience and poked fun at the “absolute idea” supposedly pervading the whole world, in which he perceived only error, evil, and imperfection. The picture of the cosmos, as projected by the Jewish and Christian religions, did not satisfy him: “Against such a view of the world as the most excellent work of an all-wise, all-good, and moreover omnipotent being there cried out too loud, on the one hand, the poverty of which it is full, and on the other, the obvious imperfection and even burlesque distortion of the most perfect of its manifest phenomena, the human ones,” Schopenhauer writes (Parerga und Paralipomena, p. 355), and this inevitably reminds us of the harangues of Lem's heroes.

Schopenhauerian pessimism, which he directed against the Leibnizian-Hegelian belief in the rational character of the universe, is used by Lem as a weapon against certain basically irrational persuasions on which Marxism, at least its simplified variety from the '50s, is founded. Of course, the “scientific” armament of the pessimistic doctrine has vastly changed in the interim: the voluntaristic factor that in Schopenhauer causes the insufficiencies of existence is changed with Lem into accident, in enclaves free of determinism, which form a loophole through which blind chance can enter the order of the cosmos. The 19th-century philosopher conceives evil as an immanent part of being, whereas in Lem it may arise unexpectedly from a series of unforeseen occurrences. Schopenhauerian Man refuses to act because he knows that his act will turn against him; Lemian Man is entangled in a heroic activity about which he does not know beforehand whether it will result in success or failure.

Notes

1. Each of the “Star Diary” stories subsequently quoted in this essay appears in a volume separate from the rest. References in the text are therefore by volume title and page number; for the names of the stories themselves, see “Works Cited.”

   It might be helpful for readers to know the chronology of the original appearance of each of the Ijon Tichy “Voyages” in Polish:

   1954 [in Sezam]: “22nd,” “23rd,” “24th,” “26th” (this last, an anti-American tale, was later discarded as “apocryphal”)

   1957 [Dzienniki gwiazdowe (1st edition)]: “12th,” “13th,” “14th”

   1961 [Ksiega robotow]: “11th Voyage,” “From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy I–IV”

   1963 [Noc kziezycowa]: “From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy V—The Washing Machine Tragedy”

   1964 [Niezwyciezony]: “The 7th Voyage,” “The Sanatorium of Dr Vliperdius,” “Let Us Save the Cosmos”

   1966 [Dzienniki gwiazdowe]: “8th,” “28th”

   1971 [Dzienniki gwiazdowe (4th edition): “18th,” “20th,” “21st”

   1971 [Bezsenność]: “The Futurological Congress”

   1976 [Maska]: “Professor A. Donda”

   1982 Wizja Lokalna

   1984 Pokój na Ziemi

   [The above list has been compiled by Franz Rottensteiner.]

2. Only at the end of the relatively late “21st Voyage,” which is written in quite another voice, does Tichy say he leaves Dichotica “a different man than the one who not so very long ago had landed here” (The Star Diaries, p. 256). In the rest of the pieces of the cycle, Tichy is truly a “timeless” character.

3. The author connects this idea with the initial situation in J. L. Borges's “The Lottery in Babylon” (cf. Lem's Fantastyka i futurologia, II:286–87).

4. I am not considering here Lem's dramatic work, which is in any case not very voluminous and consists mostly of radio and television dramas. The protagonist of those works is as a rule Professor Tarantoga, with his experiments and his “strange visitors”; but the real “protagonist” is the situation as such, which is absurd but nevertheless accessible to the recipient through his senses; this enhances both the comic effect and robs the characters of the qualities of a whole personality. The heroes of Lem's sketches are puppets that have been thrown into a labyrinth of meaning, and to that extent they remind the reader a little of the early one-act plays of Slawomir Mrozek (both authors belonged, by the way, to the same circle of friends when Mrozek was still living in Cracow).

5. Cf. M. Mazur's monograph, for instance.

Works Cited

Lem, Stanislaw. Dzienniki gwiazdowe. Warsaw: Iskry, 1958.

———. “Dzienniki gwiazdowe Ijona Tichego,” in Sezam (Warsaw: Iskry, 1955), pp. 170–226.

———. Fantastyka i futurologia. Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1970.

———. “Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy: I” [“Professor Corcoran's Boxes”], in Memoirs of a Space Traveler. Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy, trans. Michael Kandel (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 35–51.

———. “Professor A. Donda,” in Maska (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1976), pp. 51–80.

———. “Przekladaniec,” in Bezsenność (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1971), pp. 234–56.

———. “The Sanatorium of Dr Vliperdius,” in Mortal Engines, trans. Michael Kandel (NY: Seabury Press, 1977), pp. 126–37.

———. “The Washing Machine Tragedy,” in Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy, trans. Michael Kandel (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 89–111.

———. “The Twenty-First Voyage,” in The Star Diaries, trans. Michael Kandel (NY: Seabury Press, 1976), pp. 166–219.

Mazur, M. Cybernetika i charakter. Warsaw, 1976.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga i Paralipomena. Nachträge zur Lehre vom Leiden der Welt, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, ed. W. v. Lohneysen. Stuttgart & Frankfurt/Main: 1965.