SOURCE: “Playing a Game of Ontology: A Postmodern Reading of The Futurological Congress,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 32–40.

[In the following essay, Swirski examines the interpenetration of reality and illusion in The Futurological Congress and argues that the narrative's self-reflexive structure is not an autonomous framework, but integral to the novel itself.]

Among the consequences of the “radical redescriptions” (Rorty 7) of epistemology wrought by modern revolutions in science, philosophy, and literary theory were the profound changes in the theory of knowledge in general, and the theory of literature in particular. The upheaval has been latent ever since the late Enlightenment, and the epistemic problems of its new philosophy which, struggling for immutable clarity, were forced to regard its own methodology with increasing skepticism.¹ Of all epistemic shifts ushered in by the modern sensibility, perhaps the most sweeping and fundamental was the abandonment of the claim to omniscience, previously taken for granted as a cornerstone to cognition (suffice to think of Newton's “absolute and mathematical” time, or Laplace's teleological positivism). One of its most sweeping consequences was the dismissal of a notion of a privileged, objective, non-local point of view. As a result, the commonsensical conception of “reality”—be it empirical, or one “concretized” (Iser 21) during an act of reading²—yielded to an increasingly self-conscious recognition of its contingence upon the mind shaping it, i. e., one of an observer (reader).³

In literary theory and praxis, as Stanislaw Lem succinctly summed it up, such rules “have already lost their validity with Dostoyevski, and God-like omniscience … is now forbidden the author” (Microworlds 34). From its inception, (post)modern literature has been characterized by a previously unparalleled state of self-awareness of its own fictional existence and its modes of expression. And it is in that precise and important sense that “most, if not all of Stanislaw Lem's fictions are typically ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’” (Philmus 313). As such, they not only license such a self-reflexive reading, but at times even demand it, especially in view of Lem himself admitting to a penchant for including “reflexive microcosm[s]” (Csicery-Ronay 255) in his works.

Any reading of Solaris or His Master's Voice must be greatly depleted, if not downright distorted, by the failure to recognize the novels as parabolically self-reflexive commentaries on what they purport to be about—the inherent limitations of anthropocentric cognition. In a similar manner, The Investigation or, to an even greater degree, The Invincible draw attention to their self-reflexive potential on the structural level, unfolding as models and self-directed critiques of an exemplary scientific approach to the alien. A Perfect Vacuum—published nota bene in the same year as The Futurological Congress, with its quintessentially self-conscious commentary (most salient in the introductory autocritique), is probably the most explicit exhortation on Lem's part for a self-reflexive reading of his fiction.⁴ As Michael Kandel sums it up, Lem's style becomes “more self-conscious, his experimentation with formal elements bolder, with each succeeding book” (66)—in this manner paving the way for The Futurological Congress.

In “Futurological Congress as Metageneric Text,” Robert M. Philmus interestingly juxtaposes Lem's book with The Time Machine, highlighting the ease and efficacy with which both lend themselves to self-reflexive analysis. Both novellas, indeed, exhibit a number of notable similarities contained in their narrative compositions, utopian-dystopian bipolarity, and metageneric consciousness. Structurally, in both works the presence of the framing device acts as means of foregrounding the immanent connection between the futuristic and the contemporary. Through this correspondence they forge a semantic continuity between the “fiction” and the “reality” of either book (the problems encountered by the protagonists exist in the “reality” of the framework), as well as fiction (i. e., literature) and empirical reality in general. This structural correlation is further enhanced by the interplay of generic polarities present in both works, manifested by the transformation from utopia to dystopia in the minds of the protagonists. Such fluctuation, defying a facile domestication of the new Gestalt, sensitizes the reader to the fictive nature of the “reality” underlying the estranged worlds of science fiction. Finally, both novellas, given what they ostensibly purport to be about (i. e., exploring an alternative socio-reality in the guise of time travel or mock-futurology), provide a pertinent commentary by bridging their (science) fictional worlds and the one familiar to the reader through their fictive self-referentiality.

Although the validity of juxtaposing The Time Machine vis-à-vis The Futurological Congress is beyond question, I would, nevertheless, like to argue that Lem's work is more radically different from Wells's than has been allowed. My approach relies on an alternative reading of The Futurological Congress which differs in the perception and significance attached to the ontological status of the fictional “reality” of the framework, as well as to the narrative utopian-dystopian oscillation. More precisely, it argues for an essentially postmodernist reading of Lem's text in which the fictional status of the introductory framework, tacitly assumed as “real” (i. e., nonhallucinatory) is, in fact, not so. Following Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's crucial insight that “neither Lem's protagonists nor his readers ever arrive at an Archimedean point outside the totality they are trying to understand” (387), the proposed reading does not privilege the framing device as an autonomous and objective framework, but rather perceives it as the integral part of the novella's self-referential narrative strategy.

It is a truism that any fictional world acquires its comprehensibility and cognitive momentum from an implied presence of the empirical reality of the reader. In a work of science fiction, the familiar empirical reality, although by definition absent from its pages,⁵ is always present implicitly as a “point zero”—as a paradigmatic reference matrix from which we can perceive and measure the degree of estrangement. A work of science fiction must, therefore, present an estranged world which reveals its semantic content during a comparative and associative process enabled through the implied presence of the empirical world. The two worlds—fictional and empirical—ought not to be viewed, then, as irreconcilably opposed, but rather as complementary with regard to the creation of any science fictional world.

It is precisely the relationship between the world of reality (both fictional and empirical) and the world of fiction (in both senses of “fantasy” and “literature”)—or, more precisely, the subversion of this relationship—that underlies the structure of The Futurological Congress. The self-reflexive character of the book can be contained in a pair of relations. The first, intrinsic, is the correspondence between the narrative “reality” of the novella's first thirty-six pages (Tichy's sojourn at the Costa Ricana Hilton, winding down in the sewer) and the narrative “fiction” of the subsequent sections (Tichy's hallucinatory experiences). The second, extrinsic, provides a self-reflexive commentary through the correlation of the author/reader's empirical reality (“point zero”) and the estranged fictional world of the novella.

The classical (as well as classicist) reading of The Futurological Congress assumes the opening thirty-six pages to be the “reality,” or “point zero” of the novella—its intrinsic referential matrix. The subsequent erasure of ontological distinction between Tichy's wakeful state and his hallucinations does not, at any point, cast a shadow of doubt upon the character of the opening scenes. Quite unreservedly they are assumed to lie beyond the novella's ontological schizophrenia. No matter that all subsequent episodes prove themselves to be figments of Tichy's imagination, thus completely debunking the sewer's role as Tichy's (and the reader's) “talisman and touchstone to reality” (99). No matter that, contrary to the reader's expectations, the sewer that Tichy ultimately finds himself in at the end of the book does not restore his and our hold on “reality” since, in the course of his hallucinogenic experiences, it had become consonant with them.

The traditional approach makes it incumbent that the novella's opening episode which results in Tichy's escape to the very same sewer is to be trusted as inviolably “real.” Philmus's phraseology describes the novella as “Tichy's report of what happens to him at a certain futurological congress,” implying a realistic, nonhallucinatory character of the framework narrative (to the point of comparing it to “some of the journalism of Norman Mailer” [315]). References to “waking perceptions” (316) or “waking concerns” (317) again strongly imply that, indeed, such a world exists in the novella, safe from the intrusion of the dreamlike hallucination.

Thus, Philmus seems to argue for the structure of the book's episodes not as suggested by the surface narrative:

“Reality”→Dream₁→Dream₂→ … →“Reality”

but, self-reflexively, as

“Reality”→Dream₁→Dream₂→ … Dream_n

The above representation, although identifying the latent self-reflexivity in Lem's text, does not, however, exhaust its full interpretive potential. If we acknowledge the validity of a postmodern reading of Lem's fiction, we must recognize the possibility of viewing the structure of the text as:

Dream_n+1→Dream_n+2→Dream_n+3→ … →Dream_n+n

In his juxtaposition of The Futurological Congress and The Time Machine, Philmus lists as one of their common elements “a (relatively) present moment to which the time traveller finally returns” (313). In view of his own recognition of the ontological uncertainty surrounding the final sewer episode, the description of Tichy's return to the same present moment (and the same sewer!) must entail an acknowledgement of a corresponding ambiguity of the initial sewer section (assumed as a synecdoche of the “reality” of the first 36 pages).⁶ Barring the understandable reluctance to abandon the sewer as the touchstone to the book's “reality,” there are, however, many reasons in favor of an interpretation which questions the ontological status of the initial framing section.

The key factor which corroborates such a view is the intimate correlation between the predicaments experienced by the inhabitants of the initial sewer and the global conditions of the world at the time of the Eighth World Futurological Congress. Following the descent into the sewer, Tichy's drug-induced visions in the novella are clearly of a cybernetic (i. e., feedback-linked) nature; step-by-step past hallucinations usurp the place of “reality” as the generator of his visionary fantasies. Such a semantic osmosis between the dream states is explained logically by a hypothesis that all of them have the same ontological status, being in equal measure figments of Tichy's drug-stimulated imagination. But what if the same principle is discovered to be at work in the episodes preceding and involving the descent into the initial sewer?

After all, the predicaments in the initial sewer parallel unmistakably the woes of the world at large. The central theme of The Futurological Congress, overpopulation, is signaled through the presence of two parties that find their way to the concrete platform of the sewer, the situation which results in severe overcrowding. The flashlights have to be kept off “to conserve the batteries” (37) and “an ample picnic lunch” is all that the thirty-two inhabitants of the subterrene have in the way of nourishment. The petty squabbles that erupt between “the management of the Hilton” (35) and Tichy's group “who had entered the sewer under Stantor's leadership” reach “explosive” proportions when, volens nolens, both groups have to share their meagre resources—a clear allusion to the violence rampaging on the ground. Even the specter of pharmacological warfare reaches below surface so that everybody has to be equipped with an oxygen mask, and those who succumb to its ravages, like Josephine Collins, “girl Friday to the editor of Playboy, are unscrupulously exploited by others who can “profit” from such a “chemical conversion” (36).

What does one do with the presence of such unmistakable parallels between the global “reality” of Tichy's world and the “reality” of the Costa Ricana Hilton sewer? In the light of the traditional interpretation these correspondences might be regarded (or, rather, disregarded) as spurious, since the assumption of the nonimaginary character of the initial sewer could not satisfactorily account for them. One could imagine such a link to arise as a result of thematic echoing; however, a semantic explanation would still fail to account satisfactorily for the structural correspondences. After all, both visions are developed before Tichy's supposedly first hallucination, a fact which further substantiates a traditional reading's inability to explicate the sustained concordance between their elements. Since the textual evidence points to the contrary, it appears to validate a hypothesis which can account for such osmosis by annihilating the ontological distinction between the “realities” of the initial sewer and its subsequent reincarnations. Even the book's neologistic explosion begins in the first section (cryptochemocracy), again subverting its potential autonomy from the latter episodes. The proposed reading resolves the above-outlined correspondence problem by postulating that all these episodes betray common features due to their common origin in Tichy's pharmaceutically-stimulated imagination.

A further indication of the plausibility of interpreting the framework episode as no less illusory than its followers is Lem's narrative strategy evidenced in his depiction of the protagonist. The natural likability of Tichy's character is the function of his presentation as a yardstick of common humanity. A quiet,⁷ honest, good-hearted, perhaps even a bit naive, protagonist fosters easy identification and, consequently, adoption of his point of view throughout the novella (the first person narrative enhances this process even further). Just like Tichy, we endeavor to differentiate between what appears to be the uncontaminated world of his sober perceptions from that of his dream-hallucinations, and just like him we fail over and over again. It is this persistent futility of trying to establish once and for all the status of a given “reality”—especially in the case of the fluctuation between the “pharmacotopia” of abundance and the “pharmacacotopia” of need—which ultimately undermines Tichy's narrative reliability. Thus, the corollary to the erosion of Tichy's grasp on “reality” is the development of a similar hesitance in the reader, fostering a feeling of skepticism which casts its shadow not only upon the concluding section of the book, but upon any section—irrespective of how “realistic” it appears. Not even the apparent narrative verisimilitude of the novella's first thirty-six pages can be construed as sufficient basis for its discrimination from the hallucinatory episodes. With a rather apparent disregard for Archimedean frames of reference, postmodern art depicts “hallucinations or visions … with the same rhythms, the same look of objective reality as something ‘real.’”⁸ In fact, it is the initial plausibility of the hallucinatory episodes that prompts Tichy's hypotheses as to their “reality,” notwithstanding the reader's realization that this constant search for a true “reality” takes place in a paranoid labyrinth of synthetic ones.

Similarly, the narrative oscillation within the novella's utopian-dystopian bipolarity is certainly no illusion, but the facile acceptance of either on its face value can certainly result in one. Augmenting the ontological hesitation evoked by the structure of The Futurological Congress, the utopia-dystopia uncertainty further prevents an adoption of a “fail-proof” distinction between the “reality” and “fiction” of the book.

In view of the above evidence, it appears that there is sufficient factual ground for a proposed reading of The Futurological Congress in which the ontological status of every episode—including the initial sewer—is equal to (i. e., indistinguishable from) any other. The sewer, far from playing a role of a reliable touchstone to “reality,” serves rather as a remainder of the collapse and interpenetration of the ontological dialectic of “reality” and “fiction.” Erasing the borderline between “reality” and “dream,” the book offers a pertinent commentary on the present through a rendition (“actualysis”) of a possible future—much as science fiction as a genre does. After all, the entire novella is about a futurological projection, thus fulfilling science fiction's generic master program—a realistic description of the world “at other points on the space-time continuum” (Microworlds 35).

It should be noted that the abolition of an ontological distinction between the worlds of “reality” and “dream” is not new in Lem's opus. In “Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius” (Polish ed., 1967), Lem describes the peripeties of the monarch who loses himself completely in the labyrinthine reaches of synthetic “realities.” The King Genius episode is a single narrative layer in the story whose “Chinese box” generative structure, although anticipating The Futurological Congress, is closed-ended (nothing undermines the ontological status of the framework). In The Futurological Congress, while playing a linguistic game in order to expose how language shapes our perception of reality, Lem is engaged in an even more seductive game with reality itself. Exacting a toll from a reader, the generative structure of the novella is maximized to a bilaterally open-ended “Chinese box” series, with illusions following illusions, followed by illusions, followed, in turn, by illusions that there are no illusions.

No matter how tortuous Lem's ontological acrobatics, however, not even for a moment does he relent claims to rationality and cognition. Not so much abolished as obliterated, the polarity between “reality” and “fiction” is used to foster a deep feeling of alienation from the text. Using such a radical version of Verfremdungseffekt, enhanced by lexical (neologistic) and symbolical interpenetration, Lem shifts the emphasis to the moral and philosophical consequences of a drug-dependent utilitarianist heaven on earth.⁹

The last critical payoff of such a radical redescription of Lem's novella is the metageneric light it throws on the relationship between the fictional worlds of science fiction and the empirical world of the reader. Since the two cannot coincide (a necessity arising out of the genre's differentia generica), one needs to address the question as to how science fiction can remain comprehensible and pertinent despite the paradigmatic estrangement necessitated by its generic makeup. If it is not a straight-forward depiction or allusion, it must therefore be indirect, parabolic. Ultimately, the estranged world of a science fiction novel must interact with the empirical world of the reader lest it becomes an empty literary game whose meaning derives solely from its intrinsic, intrageneric relations. The Futurological Congress effectively highlights the parallels between the thematic and ideological concerns of empirical “reality” and imaginative “fiction” by subverting the categorical distinction between them. The dissolution of the dialectic thus indicates a far greater degree of permeability between its constituent elements. Perhaps—if one allows that Lem's epistemological satire is also an ontological one (and vice versa)—Tichy's world from the time of the Eighth World Futurological Congress compared to ours is not so much fiction after all.

Notes

1. For a more extensive treatment, see “Irony and Indeterminancy in the Late Enlightenment” in Donald M. Hassler's Comic Tones in Science Fiction: The Art of Compromise with Nature.

2. Iser borrows the term from Roman Ingarden's Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks.

3. This subject is popularly accessible in a number of books by Prof. Paul Davies, such as Other Worlds, God and the New Physics, or Superforce, especially in the discussion of poliverses or the paradox of Schrodinger's cat. Obviously, all reception theorists, however divergent in emphasis, by definition foreground the reader as an immanent creator of the work he reads. A similar attitude is also developed in Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Naturally, Lem himself subscribes to “the hypothesis that world view and conceptual apparatus are interdependent” (Microworlds 38).

4. I am referring to the original Polish editions from 1971. Lem returns to the same narrative mode in Imaginary Magnitude (1973; English ed., 1984) and One Human Minute (1986).

5. See Marc Angenot, “The Absent Paradigm: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Science Fiction.”

6. “Moment” alludes to a spatio-temporal, not merely temporal, circularity; cf., Wells, The Time Machine.

7. Here, onomastics suggest a characterological trait; cichy in Polish means quiet (cf. “Translator's Note,” The Star Diaries, 321). It ought to be noted that Philmus's reading of Tichy's name as “the Polish equivalent of ‘Gulliver’” (321) cannot be justified.

8. Susan Sontag, “Bergman's Persona,” Styles of Radical Will, 130. Far from extending the parallel between Lem and Bergman, the quote, nevertheless, aptly summarizes both works’ narrative logic.

9. For an excellent discussion of this problem, see John Rothfork, “Having Everything Is Having Nothing.”

Works Cited

Angenot, Marc. “The Absent Paradigm: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Science Fiction.” Science-Fiction Studies 6 (1979): 9–19.

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. “How Not to Write a Book About Lem.” Science-Fiction Studies 40 (1986): 387–91.

———. “Twenty-Two Answers and Two Postscripts: An Interview with Stanislaw Lem.” Science-Fiction Studies 40 (1986): 242–60.

Davies, Paul. God and the New Physics. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1987.

———. Other Worlds; Space, Superspace and the Quantum Universe. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

———. Superforce. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Hassler, Donald M. Comic Tones in Science Fiction: The Art of Compromise with Nature. Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, 1982.

Ingarden, Roman. Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks. Tubingen: M. Niemayer, 1968.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Kandel, Michael. “Lem in Review (June 2238).” Science-Fiction Studies 11 (1977): 65–68.

Lem, Stanislaw. Futurological Congress. Trans. Michael Kandel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1984.

———. Imaginary Magnitude. Trans. Marc E. Heine. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1984.

———. Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Franz Rottensteiner. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1984.

———. One Human Minute. Trans. Catherine S. Leach. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1986.

———. The Star Diaries. Trans. Michael Kandel. New York: Avon, 1977.

Philmus, Robert M. “Futurological Congress as Metageneric Text.” Science-Fiction Studies 40 (1986): 313–28.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Rothfork, John. “Having Everything Is Having Nothing.” Southwest Review 3 (1981): 293–306.

Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969.

Wells, Herbert George. The Time Machine. New York: Random House, 1931.