SOURCE: “On Lem's Highcastle,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 13, Pt. 3, November, 1986, pp. 345–51.

[In the following essay, Anninski examines Lem's philosophical and literary perspective in Highcastle: A Remembrance, drawing parallels between Lem's formative experiences and his preoccupation with the development of individuality and the quest for absolute meaning.]

On the surface, Stanislaw Lem's autobiographical novel Wysoki Zamek (Highcastle: A Remembrance, 1966) is closer to David Copperfield than to Solaris. This is unexpected. The first emotion of the reader of Highcastle is surprise: Lem, the writer of SF [science fiction], has betrayed his talent; Lem the philosopher has become a historian of mores; Lem the intellectual has turned into a painter of realistic pictures and psychological scenes. Naturally, the critical evaluation of Highcastle in the USSR began with talk of a “shift in status.” Lem's novel was interpreted in the tradition of Dickens and Alexy Tolstoy, and the purely philosophical aspect of this novel was overshadowed by the unexpectedly conventional character of the narrative.

I. Bestuzhev-Lada's introduction to the book offers such an interpretation, one which readers of the Russian will undoubtedly peruse (along with Kirill Andreev's biographical sketch in the Afterword to the volume) together with Lem's novel. It is necessary therefore at the outset to dispute the point that Highcastle is some sort of hiatus in Lem's career as a fantastic and intellectual writer.

No, Highcastle has nothing to do with those novels about childhood bent on preserving the traditions of the good old 19th century. The novel lacks elegiac respect for childhood; in fact, Lem, with characteristically direct mischievousness, calls Dickens boring, like the autumn rain. As for “realistic pictures,” the pre-war provincial Poland of Highcastle (the hero's childhood takes place in the family of a respectable doctor) does not offer anything new in this respect. This sort of childhood has been described in world literature many times, and Lem's novel presents neither new properties nor fresh emotions in regard to it. In order to understand the novel, it is necessary to move away from Dickens and even Alexy Tolstoy and to view Lem's work in the context of a completely different tradition.

Of course, all analogies are arbitrary to some extent, but I will venture to offer one here. Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Les Mots, the confessions of an interpretative and young mind, the victim of its self-sufficiency, allows us to comprehend better both the essence of the moral evolution of the hero of Highcastle and the meaning of its genre. Although formally this novel is a work of fiction, its genre is essentially philosophical. However, following the logic of the narrative, we should begin the analysis of it from the literary rather than philosophical perspective; for in this case the path towards philosophical meaning lies through the fictional narrative. Figuratively speaking, it is possible to enter the house which is Highcastle only through the door opened by the author himself: through the perception of a style which, for Lem, is the primary element of his philosophical novel.

Lem's style represents the free improvisation of an intellectual who observes everything in passing and ironically distances himself from everyday life. This game with objects is in itself an indication of the writer's interest in that which is “beyond the objects.” Lem is devoid of the impulse to chronicle events; he abhors the style which paints life in rosy colors and congeals thought. Lem's style is “un-glued,” “un-constrained,” ironic and intellectual through and through. This style provides its own antidote: at every step, Lem warns himself to avoid schematism and weaves speculative hypotheses into strange ornaments as he strives to get rid of the very feature which makes his style brilliant and charming—namely, speculation.

Lem's artistic consciousness cannot flee speculation. However, it achieves what it sets out to do: Highcastle is the history of the formation of this constructive speculative consciousness. Or, in simpler language, the novel narrates the story of a talented child of the technological era who suddenly experiences … the most real and old yearning for ideals.

This little child finds fulfillment in breaking his toys. This is the boundless ecstasy of a builder and engineer: to disassemble, dissect, tear apart and find out how everything is put together. This little inquisitive child is different from the happily contemplative children of the previous century; if Norbert Wiener starts his biography with the words “I was a wonderful child,” then Lem proudly announces: “I was a terrible child.”

Nevertheless, Lem's hero is rooted in the “pleasing and naïve seriousness” of that same 19th century which believes in the perfection of “little wheels” and rollers and in the mechanical “malleability of matter.” The child is enamored of the wheel; he believes in the mechanisms of nature and, above all, in his “constructive power” over them. Indeed, we can say that the engineering aspect of this consciousness helps explain its attraction to the mechanical, logical, and compliant world of “malleable matter.”

The hero loves the wheel because in its world “two plus two equals four.” He avoids and fears everything alive—rats, insects, strangers—because living things are unpredictable and illogical. “It is so much easier for me to talk about things … than about people!” People would require a completely different, ethical approach. At any rate, the ecstasy of disassembling which rules the hero's technical consciousness is hardly applicable to living beings.

Lem analyzes the ethical situation as determined by two constant factors: his hero is extremely aggressive in the mechanical world and at the same time desperately shy, reserved, and lonely in the world of living beings. “I was fully self-sufficient” refers to the hero's life among people. In the world of objects, on the other hand, we find a keen interest, protracted contact, and a sense of uninterrupted expansiveness.

One curious detail should be mentioned here: this young mind is comfortable with the idea of space, but the category of time is incomprehensible to it. Space is something which can be conquered; time, on the other hand, is unconquerable. Unable to deal with the inexorable character of time, the young hero articulates his own private “time” in spatial terms: “tomorrow” is something which descends from the ceiling, from the neighbors above, while “yesterday” is something which falls down to the neighbors below. This is how it becomes possible for the hero to understand the category of time.

The novel provides another curious detail: Lem portrays his own childhood as if he were writing about someone entirely unrelated to him, almost a stranger. He is sharply aware of the uncomplicated emotional mechanism of this child when he mercilessly brings to the surface the hero's subconscious impulses and naïve motivations. The author truly disassembles the hero, analyzing him as a mechanism. The reader is not given to understand that Lem is writing about himself; the feeling that the author and hero are one and the same person—which could have helped the reader keep track of the changing circumstances of the story—is not there.

This son of the technological age can do without mysticism. His aim is to observe the workings of the wheels of this world. Then, when he is already an adult, he looks intently at the “little wheels” of the mind which used to be his own. This happens because the transition from one age to another does not leave the hero's personality unchanged. It would appear that he reconstructs himself in his entirety, adapting to the new conditions. When Lem speaks of his hero as “I,” he uses the pronoun almost formally. His attitude towards his former “I” is better expressed in the words “the child I used to be” than in the word “I,” since “I” generally refers to an unchanging personality.

The story of the hero's school years is one of the most powerful chapters of Highcastle. Here, as before, the hero looks inward. However, his self-sufficient personality has to enter into a completely different system of human relations, what Lem calls “the school as a subculture” and what sociologists would call an “informal organization.” Plainly speaking, it is a network of secret sympathies and dependencies within one group. This network is extremely solid and at the same time it is flexible; it is built on authority and, simultaneously, on the most subtle fluctuations in prestige. Its inexorable and rigid hierarchy of influence is responsible for pointing out to each student his or her clearly delineated role. Lem shrewdly portrays the two indispensable positions of each school class: the dummy and the jester. We can also identify a few other roles, necessary for the transformation of a mass of students into a hidden mechanism functioning according to the laws of psycho-sociology. What about the amazing harmony of these “hidden school collectives” with their eternal struggle against the teachers, or the constant cunning with which they slip out of the hands of the instructors and protect, as Lem jokingly writes, “the scorching Saharas of their ignorance”?

Lem's young hero displays an astonishing ability to adapt to this hidden hierarchy and secret system of connections which demand an instant readiness for change. The “self-sufficient” individual, from the beginning focussed on the cognitive assessment of the mechanical world, beautifully fits into a construct. He immediately becomes “like everybody else” and even discovers a special charm in this self-levelling: it is a feast of the mind for the hero, who is aware of his role and derives satisfaction from the perspicacity of his consciousness, which continuously receives situational tasks and is brilliant in solving them.

However, even when adapting itself to the system of connections and joining the universally manipulated crowd, becoming “like everyone else,” this “constructive consciousness” retains individuality. Lem's hero always remembers that which he himself terms “the absolute.” This is perhaps the most interesting item of Lem's spiritual autobiography: the little child retains his thirst for the “absolute.”

It is difficult to define this category precisely. The “absolute” is not a term but rather an artistic symbol which does not exist independently but manifests itself as a psychological thirst satisfied by many disparate things. For the badgered schoolboy, his strict instructor is a representative of the “absolute”; and by manipulating the teacher, the schoolboy seemingly enters a bilateral agreement with a divinity. A teacher from a neighboring school is by no means the “absolute” for the hero, but an indistinguishable object, while the neighboring school is an alien universe whose strange teachers do not belong to the network of fears and associations constituting the student's diminutive “absolute.”

Lem's speculative hero cannot annihilate his thirst for the “absolute”; he fills the gap in his soul with the “little wheels” of his childhood. Here, however, “the wheels” appear as unbelievably large: a tower in town becomes the embodiment of “paradise”—the “High Castle”—and the schoolboy is absorbed in composing fantastic documents which would allow some strange people to receive either gold bars or special rights in a strange land. … Piles of papers adorned with vignettes and seals occupy the hero for hours; he himself inhabits this chimerical and imaginary world.

Of course, here again we find the hero's yearning for the “absolute.” The boy draws hundreds of “identity cards,” for example, which in seven stages of imaginary exchanges will allow the “presenter” to ascend to an imaginary throne. … However, in the world of conventional values, the thirst for the “absolute” arouses contempt: here rules the magic of money, the power of numbers, and the thunder and lightning of an official round stamp.

Lem's attitude towards his youthful excesses is obviously ironic. The author calls it “identificationism,” and in his self-mocking attitude goes so far as to apply biblical terminology to describe his obsession with documents: in Lem's view, it allowed him to experience the tragic farce of existence. If this is so, let us appreciate Lem's humor. Let us imagine the picture of life which emerges in the head of a tiny and shrewd person who realizes that he is merely a little screw in a machine. “In the beginning there was a Document” is the “absolute” which appears in place of the Word-Logos of John the Evangelist. Is not this the bitter fruit that feeds Lem's constant self-mockery? He yearns for the sublime but believes in identity cards, thinks about reasons for everything but sees only the “little wheels,” wants to confess but realizes that his confession will merely become “another book.” This is truly a “tragic farce” of existence.

One should not disregard the first part of this formula, however. There is a true measure of tragedy in the hero's perception of himself. In order to elucidate this point, it is necessary to refer to Lem's favorite “idea of a crevice” developed in a number of brilliant passages in Highcastle and in Lem's culturological works, especially in his “Philosophy of Chance.”¹

According to Lem, humanity is playing a game of chess with nature (or with the “absolute”). However, in this game nature does not make the most powerful but only minimally sufficient moves. As a result, humanity has accessible to it a loophole of sorts, a possibility of limitless variations which allows cultures to flourish. Free choice exists in spite of nature, where “the wheels” turn as in a good mechanism. Freedom grows in the crevices over-looked by nature. This is a leitmotif of Lem's work. He enthusiastically describes Medieval painters, for instance, who “smuggled” their individuality into the crevices of dogmatic canons. According to this line of thought, Andrei Rublev expressed his individual personality when he pretended and played games with his faith rather than when he truly believed.²

Even here, though, Lem is constantly assailed by doubts. His thoughts on the “smuggling” in of individuality, which surreptitiously creeps into the crevices of dogma, are based on the set stereotypes of the man who grew up and became aware of himself among the “little wheels” and “malleable matter.” It would be strange to reduce the work of the great Medieval and Renaissance painters to this rather pragmatic “smuggling” operation. I think that the canon for them was not at all a “ban” but an “authorization”; they did not have to avoid the canon for this simple reason: that they believed in it. That is why their individuality was expressed in an open submission to their faith and not in the “smuggling through a crevice.” Lem knows and feels this with his artistic sense. As he tries, with the help of the “dictionary of the personality,” to describe ancient art escaping the dogma which this art does not believe in but shrewdly takes into account, Lem does not feel superior to the “naïve” old painters who were seemingly enslaved by illusions and myths. Deep down in his soul, he is terribly envious of these slaves of metaphysics and dogmatism who, after all, had their faith. That is why he damns the “terrifying freedom” of the “era of technological civilization.” When the all-prevailing “quest” replaces revelation, humanity is doomed to walk in a vicious circle: the “identification card” replaces the “absolute.” Lem's philosophical autobiography is a penetrating and painful examination of the interpretative consciousness incapable of faith.

It remains for us to put this plot into a historical and social context. In Highcastle, the hero does not develop in a vacuum, but in a Polish town of the 1920s and '30s. The last chapter of the novel, describing Polish “war preparations,” is suffused with the farcical atmosphere of a comedy: puffed-up and haughty officers, antiquated weapons, universal arrogance and mendacity. Very soon the Polish army, boasting “the best cavalry in the world,” will crack under Nazi tanks. A tragic feeling of bluff fills the hero's childhood and youth in the provinces of bourgeois Poland, itself a murky province of bourgeois Europe on the very eve of catastrophic war. The context of Lem's novel is presented very clearly: it is here and precisely in this manner that arrogant bourgeois consciousness reduced the whole world to the “wheels” of fortune, when it suddenly realized its rootlessness and envisioned its own end.

However, the human thirst for the “absolute” exists to extricate humanity from historical catastrophes. Lem was able to preserve this thirst for the “absolute” when he turned from a little boy, beaten by his teacher and yelled at by an officer, into one of the most prominent intellectual writers of his time. Lem's skeptical mind colors the hero's yearning for the “absolute” with bitter irony; he conceals his newly awakened “terrible seriousness” behind the refined forms of “free criticism.” … However, when a skeptic becomes terrified at his inability to believe, this signifies a departure from skepticism. At this point one can start building the High Castle of true human spirituality.

Notes

1. Part of “The Philosophy of Chance” appeared in Voprosy filosofii, no. 8 (1969).

2. Rublev (late 14th-early 15th century) is Russia's most famous icon painter, and the subject of a renowned film by A. Tarkovsky (1966) [N. Peterson].