[In the following essay, Swirski applies game theory analysis to Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub in order to describe the insanity and paranoia that conditions military strategy, political ideology, and group rationality.]

1. INTRODUCTION

Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub was published in 1961, only a year before the Cuban missile crisis, when the world faced the spectre of a superpower nuclear confrontation.¹ It would be reductive to propose a straightforward connection between these horrific events and the literary genesis of Memoirs. As Lem remarked to me during a recent interview, he is not a writer oriented par excellence politically; his works “have never been meant as pasquils or pamphlets aimed at any particular political system.”² On the other hand, Memoirs is without doubt a contemporary work, with the ostensible sphere of interest ‘topical’ of its historical time. Written at the hysterical peak of the Cold War, the novel is replete with matters foremost in everyone's mind: espionage, superpower conflict, global rivalry, as well as the inanity and insanity of the military enterprise.

By means of game-theoretic analysis I will show how, modelling the acute paranoia of strategic superiority, Lem's work unmasks the insidious (because not irrational) madness so frequently embraced in the name of the Cold War, Containment, Linkage, Desert Shield, or any other slogan for doctrinal and military confrontation.³ I will also try to clarify an interesting aspect of Game Theory (henceforth GT) concerning the concepts of individual and group rationality as well as behavior. My focus here will be the reconstruction of what Andrzej Stoff identifies as the “rules which determine the functioning of [the novel's] world.”⁴ In the process I will show how and why the rules of the Third Pentagon's game of espionage, and the ontological and social world it creates, are one and the same thing.

Effective as it can be, GT must not, however, be deemed a philosopher's stone which guarantees infallible guidance through textual indeterminacies. In Memoirs especially, one must not overlook a problem of reliability inherent in the first-person narration. All details at the reader's disposal have been filtered through the protagonist's mind, becoming tainted with his strategic considerations. As the framing introduction contributes little of essence to the understanding of the novel, there is no ‘external’ source of information about the depicted events. In the face of this epistemological difficulty, it would be presumptuous to insist that the account of Memoirs offered through my game theoretic analysis is the conclusive one. It is possible that my identification of the central conflict and players, as well as the enumeration of their strategic choices, preferences, and outcomes, may meet with less than unanimous approval. Nevertheless, by formally foregrounding its analytic assumptions, GT offers an excellent methodological invitation to examine them for alternative representations of the modelled events.⁵

2. MEMOIRS FOUND IN A BATHTUB: A COGNITIVE METAPHOR

Memoirs opens with an Introduction the content, tone, and style of which distinguish it from the rest of the work. In a mock-scholarly manner, the framework estranges the contemporary twentieth century chronotope. It alludes to the land of Ammer-Ka devoted to the worship of the deity Kap-eh-taahl (or Almighty Da-Laahr), and to plotting the destruction of the antagonistic Heathen Dog in the Third Pentagon, its collective military brain. Authored by scholars of the thirty-second century, the Introduction falteringly reconstructs the history of the “Late Neogene”: the founding of the Third Pentagon, the ravages of a paper-destroying germ from Uranus, the ensuing “papyralysis” and ferocious collapse of nation-based civilization, and its eventual rebirth as a planetary federation. This elaborate framework is only an introduction to the memoir proper—in the story identified as “Notes From the Neogene”—found in a bathtub next to a human skeleton at the excavated site of the ancient Third Pentagon. The main segment of the novel is thus a transcript of the writings of an anonymous Pentagon agent (from now on I will simply call him Agent), in which he describes his desperate efforts to pursue his Mission.

Wandering aimlessly through the hermetic labyrinth of the underground Pentagon Building, the nameless spy records with incomprehension and terror the self-devouring madness of its way of life. In a quasi-picaresque manner, his quest is structured around episodic encounters involving various Building functionaries. Among the most important scenes are (in narrative order):

1) the office of Commanderal⁶ Kashenblade, who destroys Agent's entrance pass, and cryptically alludes to the protagonist's Mission;

2) the tour around the Department of Collections (in effect a spy-museum);

3) the office of an old-young spy in golden spectacles, who discourses with the protagonist on the universal principle of Cause and Effect and, misreading his intentions and identity, commits suicide;

4) the chapel where Agent witnesses the funeral service for the old-young spy, receives a report from a monk spy, Brother Persuasion, and meets Father Orfini;

5) the office of Major Erms who gives Agent a copy of his Mission—or does he?;

6) Department of Codes where Captain Prandtl lectures the protagonist on the nature and ubiquity of codes and ciphers;

7) the Archives where Agent samples the monumental espionage library database;

8) a bathroom where Agent meets the pale-faced spy who, explaining the Building in a frustratingly enigmatic manner, only confuses Agent even further;

9) the doctor's office in the Medical Section where a seemingly spontaneous drunken party turns out to be a setup staged by multiple agents provocateurs;

10) same locale, where Agent meets Father Orfini again, who proposes to him a secret pact in which betrayal is a condition sine qua non;

11) the bathroom again where Agent discovers the body of the pale-faced spy who had (presumably) committed suicide, and where Agent (presumably) does the same.

The character of this underground spying world is delineated by two incongruous scenes. First, following the enigmatic meeting with Commanderal Kashenblade, Agent concludes that the modus operandi (and, as he later comprehends, modus vivendi) of the Pentagon's bureaucratic Moloch is based on a random system of operations. Second, he finds in whatever he sees of his Mission a verbatim account of all his apparently chaotic wanderings in the Building. Everything is there, down to a faithful rendition of his inner thoughts and emotional states. In the face of this antinomy of the most general (because ontological) kind, a reader might wonder what is really going on? The Pentagon's deterministic prescience, evident in its foreknowledge of the protagonist's thoughts and deeds, would be hard to digest on its own, but it becomes downright unpalatable alongside the randomness which underlies the Building's operation.

The tension between the concepts of determinism and randomness, or Order and Chance, is, as N. Katherine Hayles has remarked, endemic to Lem's work.⁷ This profound interplay prompts a Polish critic, Ewa Balcerzak, to see Lem's fictions as “philosophical treatises,” by means of which the author constructs models of social situations and conducts “multifaceted analyses on these models.”⁸ It is thus not coincidental that Balcerzak's master key to Lem's fiction applies to the kind of antinomy that frustrates the literal reading of Memoirs. The chronoprobes from the future are another pointer towards viewing the novel as a modelling metaphor. Possibly the most conspicuous endorsement for such approach lies, however, in the work's grotesque modality. Dispensing with vraisemblance, the grotesque shifts the interpretive focus from the vehicle of surface narration to its symbolic tenor. Indeed, any literal reading of Memoirs is thwarted by elements which defy the notion of any, physical or literary, realism. It would be as absurd to interpret literally “machines to change night into day and vice versa,” as physically nonsensical to rationalize the concept of “counterfeit atoms and electrons” (27).⁹ Moreover, the wealth of intertextual allusions, the archaic stylization of language and orthography (abandoned in translation), the allegory of the central elements (Building, Mission, Gate), and the symbolic depiction of the nameless protagonist as Everyman, all reinforce the picture of the novel as a metaphor.¹⁰

3. GROUP RATIONALITY: TRAPPED INSIDE THE BUILDING

In the central scene the protagonist is offered a chance to enter a secret pact, knowing that he is going to be betrayed, while being encouraged to betray his collaborator in return. The betrayal is, however, beside the point. Entering the pact not out of strategic considerations but with sincerity, Agent should be able to fill the prescribed form of behavior with spontaneous and authentic content, even though it will have absolutely no impact on the course of events.

This perverse situation is analogous to the ontological roller-coaster of Borges's “The Lottery in Babylon.” The universal lottery inverts the relation between Order and Chance, gradually substituting one for the other, so that the objective train of events remains completely intact, yet its ontological representation is altered in the most profound sense. This leads to paradoxes like that of a thief who steals a ticket which credits him with a burning of his tongue, which also happens to be the penalty fixed by the legal code for the theft of a ticket. Thus some Babylonians can argue “that he deserved the burning irons in his status of a thief; others, generously, that the executioner should apply it to him because chance had determined it that way.”¹¹ In the same way, totalizing the concept of intention, Memoirs models individual and communal attitudes to the world in order to examine the essence of rationality in a situation gone strategically mad. The world of the Third Pentagon is also an institutional structure whose form totally determines its content. It may be relevant here to relate Lem's remarks from Fantastyka i futurologia (Science Fiction and Futurology) on the genesis of this “totalizing” concept:

The idea for such a structuring of a fantastic plot came from the reading of spy memoirs; I remarked that a spy who works notoriously for both antagonistic sides may, after a certain period of his activity, be no longer certain whom he is deceiving and whom aiding; acts of patriotism or betrayal are then differentiable only statistically (according to whom he has respectively more—or less harmed or helped by means of his reported information).¹²

The spiritus movens of the novel is obviously the giga-bunker of the Last Pentagon. We should thus begin by examining the fundamental questions pertaining to the Building's nature. What kind of place is it? What kind of world does it create in its splendid isolation? What rules of behavior does it foster? Or, even more generally, what implications for the concept of (group) rationality does the existence of its hermetic, suspicion-ridden world entail? The Building's idiosyncrasies are brought to the fore during the confrontation with the outside world from which it attempts to shut itself off. The Outside intrudes upon the self-contained universe of the Pentagon in the form of the anonymous narrator-protagonist. Although Stoff finds little evidence to confirm Agent's arrival from the outside, the text leaves little doubt about it.¹³Memoirs opens with the mention of an entrance pass without which Agent presumably could not have penetrated the underground fortress. The meal tickets that Agent must obtain corroborate his status as an outsider to the Building's structure prior to his summons. Besides, despite the Pentagon's autarky, its gradual infiltration by the Anti-Building's agents confirms that not only does the Outside exist, but that it must have means of repeated access to the Building.

As a determinant of the strategic position in which Agent finds himself inside the Third Pentagon, I propose an analysis of the conflict of interests arising from his dealings with the Building. Although the interaction between Agent and the Building takes place over a number of days, the apparent constancy of their respective preferences allows it to be condensed into a normal (matrix) form. I assume that the game which models the conflict in question has only two players: the anonymous protagonist-spy and the Building. Despite the fact that the Building interacts with Agent through various functionaries, all of them present a consistently monolithic front to his frantic inquiries, making him react as if they were united against him by virtue of a common strategy.

This is an important point in the novel which, as a whole, presents aspects of group rationality that depart in intriguing ways from established wisdom on that subject. On one level Memoirs is a dynamic illustration of a community which, by dint of its military and strategic conditioning, ought to be a paradigmatic model of calculating rationality. At the same time the novel questions the rationality postulates commonly advanced by writers in economics, as well as organization, decision and game theories, particularly regarding the seemingly unobjectionable transfer of individual to group rationality. I return to this problem shortly; for now, however, let us consider the related question of individuality. Why should the Building's employees be so indistinguishable in their actions and attitudes? Whence such a dominant urge to obliterate their individuality and idiosyncrasy for the sake of conformism to the dictates of the higher organism? How can such uniformity be sustained in the first place over time, as well as over inevitable changes in personel?

Such changes are well documented in the novel. Replacement and rotation in the Building must be the order of the day because of so many deaths that are a staple of its counter-intelligence operations. During his brief acquaintance with the Pentagon, Agent witnesses a number of executions, deaths, and suicides. Furthermore, just like the pale-faced spy before him, he himself is a newcomer, drafted to augment the underworld Pentagon spying corps. I suggest that social organisms which experience a significant rate of replacement maintain their unique character owing to the convergence of reciprocal expectations. Every member of the group ends up expecting what everybody else expects of everybody else. In such atmosphere the expectations, and consequently the behavior of every new inductee change in time to change the expectations of subsequent recruits. The result is an unwritten “social contract,” whose tacit terms are willy-nilly embraced by new arrivals. This observation is of considerable interest, because it suggests that the rationality of individual conduct may be dominated by the paradigm in the behavior of the group, without suspending the personal rationality of the individuals concerned.

This surrender of individual preferences and the often attendant feeling of helplessness or inevitability, is a result of the convergence of expectations. What is directly experienced by individuals is not even the outcome, but the expectation of the outcome, and this subjective perception of its inevitability turns into a statistical certitude of a self-fulfilling prophesy. The reciprocal expectations of expected expectations make the final result a matter of course, while denying every individual the power to thwart it. In this context of tacit and reciprocal equilibrium any change can only be a result of explicit collusion. The difficulties attending successful coalition-formation safeguard the relative stability of the Building, just as, to a certain extent, they do in many real-life social institutions and traditions. The esprit de corps analyzed above is a default setting which effectively limits the options open to any single individual by virtue of reciprocal anticipation of everyone else's expectations.

These conclusions are surprising, and far from banal. They also seem to contradict some assumptions about the compatibility of individual and group rationality. An agent may be rational in desiring a certain outcome, and in believing that a certain course of action may be the right way to secure this outcome. At the same time, he may also be rational in concurrently not desiring to pursue this course of action. This apparent contradiction is a result of the strategic consideration of the convergence of reciprocal expectations. This only superficial irrationality is at the bottom of the “herd instinct,” whereby people feel compelled to perform actions which they both do not want to perform, and are free not to perform.

To return to the story, it must be stressed that the assumption of partial conflict between Agent and the Building is the only plausible one, even though the opening scenes, where Agent in vain seeks a spying cell ready to receive him, might suggest a coordination problem instead. The latter would imply a cooperative motivation, reducing the interaction to coordinating the players'moves. Memoirs fails, however, to corroborate such a scenario. Very early in the novel Agent meets Major Erms, who unequivocally states that he is in possession of a copy of Agent's Mission. Had the interaction been of a cooperative nature, the coordination problem would have been solved at this point. Instead, despite multiple encounters with the major, the protagonist never receives anything but a few vague evasions concerning the very undertaking for which he had apparently been recruited.

The Mission with which Agent is to be entrusted is the central symbol of the novel and an index of his strategic quest in the subterranean world. Always allegorically capitalized in the text, the Mission is Agent's raison d'être in the Building, as well as—at least to his mind—the raison d'être for the Building itself. Only such unshakeable belief in the Mission can account for his refusal to leave the Pentagon while knowing of the location of the exit from it.¹⁴ Whatever torments, whatever tribulations he endures in his quest, Agent stubbornly clings to the hope that “that accursed, that thrice accursed Mission” (190) must, after all, exist. Without it, his summons to the Pentagon and all the subsequent incidents would appear to be spurious and arbitrary.

4. THE MISSION GAME: RATIONALITY AND PLAYERS’ PREFERENCES

Based on textual evidence, and allowing that the ranking may initially seem counterintuitive, I construe Agent's preferences in his conflict with the Building to be (from best to worst):

4. The Building provides Mission (M); Agent pursues Mission (P).

3. The Building provides Mission (M); Agent does not pursue Mission (-P).

2. The Building does not provide Mission (-M); Agent pursues Mission (P).

1. The Building does not provide Mission (-M); Agent does not pursue Mission (-P).

The point requiring comment is Agent's next worst outcome which implies that, in the event of the Mission's being denied to him, he would still try to pursue it. There are, in fact, at least four plausible interpretations of this unusual situation. It is possible that Agent tries to pursue some mission, in the absence of indication that the Mission—his mission, exists. Conversely, his behavior can be understood as designed to force the Building to supply him with a mission—by repeatedly stating his belief in the existence of one, he states his preference which he hopes will be taken into account. Furthermore Agent's persistence can be explained as a search for reasons why he has not been given a Mission. In fact, his efforts to discover its contents can be interpreted as a natural reaction of making sure that there indeed is not one.

The Building's preferences in this conflict are:

4. Do not provide Mission (-M); Agent pursues Mission (P).

3. Do not provide Mission (-M); Agent does not pursue Mission (-P).

2. Provide Mission (M); Agent pursues Mission (P).

1. Provide Mission (M); Agent does not pursue Mission (-P).

Before drawing a payoff matrix for the Mission game, we must address the question of the Building's preference that Agent pursue his mission. Why would it be in the Building's interest that Agent should not cease in his belief in the Mission, as Memoirs makes clear? After all, every time when the Building's nerve-racking “monkey business” becomes too much for him to bear, they offer him “spiritual comfort” (127) to restore his morale and faith in the Mission. Despite incontestable textual evidence, it is not easy to offer a universally plausible interpretation of the Building's motives. For one, the novel is sparse in the account of the Building's intentions vis-à-vis Agent. Second, there is the already mentioned epistemological uncertainty inherent in the first person narration. Agent is not only the protagonist; he is also the narrator of the memoirs and, as such, a potentially unreliable source of information about the Building. One plausible hypothesis may be that, as a neophyte to the spying business, Agent does not initially merit an integration into the Building's overall structure and strategy—hence the temporary pretence of an important Mission which he must pursue. Or, perhaps, the Mission is only a decoy since Agent's scheduled role is that of a catalyst whose spontaneity is a microscope through which the Building can study the behavior of its agents. The best example in support of this theory might be the drunken party episode in which Agent takes part because Dolt needs “a suitable actor” (169) to help him test Sempriaq's reactions. The simplest and perhaps the most convincing explanation may be, however, the Building's uncertainty as to Agent's—or anybody else's, for that matter—loyalty. Compulsively suspicious, the Building could never achieve certainty that Agent has not been subverted by the enemy, perhaps even before entering its premises.

The most arguable point in my ordering of the Building's preferences is the assumption of its greatest utility in not providing Agent with the Mission which he so much desires. The outcomes where Mission does not exist are ranked as the Building's best and second best, whereas providing Agent with a specific Mission involves in either case a worse result. The existence of the Mission, or rather a Mission—any Mission—is not the desirable solution for the Building since it would undermine the minimax strategy adopted in the course of its espionage activities against the Anti-Building. The definition of a solution to zero-sum games states that there is a strategy pair which guarantees to one of the players a certain minimum payoff and prevents the other from maximizing his payoff beyond the same value, irrespective of the moves one's opponent might make. Since in a zero-sum conflict both players are motivated to minimize the other's gains while maximizing their own, the minimax/maximin strategy is considered a solution to the conflict.

How does this apply to our situation? Both the underground Pentagon and its Communist counterpart are relics from a pre-Federation era. Locked in a spying duel of their Cold War ideologies, they perpetuate the implacable hostility which has long since lost relevance beyond their precincts. The circumstances pitch the Building against the Anti-Building in a conflict where they occupy completely antagonistic positions. This is exactly the kind of situation that indicates the use of minimax/maximin strategies. Let us recall that the Building routinely operates on a random basis, completely resigning from using pure strategies (in fact, the Building's pure strategy is to play randomly all the time, i. e. with a probability equal to unity). Furthermore, any distinction between the Building and its Communist counterpart has become artificial because of a complete mutual takeover by n-tuple agents whose loyalty, definable only as a function of the degree to which they have been unmasked, is more “virtual” than real. Who is to say, after all, that the Building is not, in fact, the Anti-Building? Refusing to help Agent despite his renewed pleas, raising his hopes only to dash them the next moment, offering him pacts where betrayal is a condition sine qua non, in its actions the Building is indistinguishable from its mirror image on “the other side.”

Because of such pervasive interpenetration and basic inability to distinguish ally from foe, the only reasonable assumption the Building can make is that any course of action, any Mission it might conceive is already known to its adversary. In an artifice of Machiavellian proportions, the Third Pentagon finds itself in a situation where, in order not to betray its purpose, it must have no purpose at all. Plans, of course, are still planned, schemes schemed, and plots plotted—in fact, their production evokes Kafkaesque images of the deluge of paper and information in “thousands of original documents … everywhere, on every level of the Building … millions and millions of them, and each one different!” (34). The information-processing capabilities of even the best spy must perforce be limited, making the Building's paper profligacy quite sensible: for any human agent the presence of a cornucopia of information “may be as or more damaging than too little.”¹⁵

This casts a different light on the optimalizing concept of rationality. Any interpersonal analysis requires the establishment of the utility function, for the purpose of which theoreticians use a rational model of an agent who knows what he wants, has well determined goals and preferences, is able to evaluate any set of alternatives, and always optimizes his profit. In addition he is assumed to be perfectly informed, as well as able to process properly all the data at his disposal. However, as Lem hypothesizes in Memoirs, even if agents had perfect access to perfect information—or conversely, if they knew all the rules of the game they may be involved in—their rational behavior according to the classical postulates could still be in question. The moment when the game becomes too vast and complicated for an individual to grasp it in its entirety, for practical purposes it may become akin to a free-form game. Players may thus observe or fail to observe rules which were in force at different stages of the same game—in essence making up the rules as they go. Lem points to the fact that rationality seems to be at least partially indexed (determined) not only by the quality, but also the quantity of the available information.

Rationality is usually seen as distributed evenly alongside a one-dimensional axis, with perfect rationality and unconditional irrationality at either pole. Lem's model suggests that rationality is a much more compound, complex, and heterogenous phenomenon than imagined. This hypothesis has potential ramifications in just about any sphere of human activity, from arms negotiations and constitutional law, to school test evaluations and interpersonal relationships. Although surprising, it seems to be anticipated by Schelling, who formulated the following insights at about the time of composition of Memoirs:

Rationality is a collection of attributes, and departures from complete rationality may be in many different directions. Irrationality can imply a disorderly and inconsistent value system, faulty calculation, an inability to receive messages or to communicate efficiently; it can imply random or haphazard influences in the reaching of decisions or the transmission of them, or in the receipt or conveyance of information; and it sometimes merely reflects the collective nature of a decision among individuals who do not have identical value systems and whose organizational arrangements and communication systems do not cause them to act like a single entity.¹⁶

This is not yet the end of paradoxes. The fact that the minimax strategy is inherently defensive results in the Building's total military impotence. Nevertheless it is the strategy one must resort to playing against an informed opponent. We can thus see that, contrary to common sense, acting randomly and burying itself under mountains of “papyr,” the Building conducts, in fact, a subjectively rational strategy from the point of view of the bizarre circumstances in which it finds itself. Strange as it seems, in some circumstances it can be perfectly “rational” to desire to be irrational in order to gain advantage and tactical leverage over one's adversary.

Consider threat situations. Many standard attributes of rationality can become disabilities against an opponent who is impervious to punitive threats by virtue of his (real or feigned) inability to function rationally. This is why children, madmen, fanatics, or doomsday machines cannot be threatened as effectively as agents who have a certifiable ability to hear, comprehend, and act freely. On the other hand, threat efficacy increases as an index of perceived “irrationality.” A hardened terrorist, known to hold his life in contempt, can threaten to detonate explosives strapped to his belt with more credibility than a timid civil servant. One of the great advantages of GT is its power to analyze the strategic basis of such paradoxical tactics which, despite appearances of irrationality, can turn out to be sound and rational after all. Let us not forget that rationality, far from being an inherent attribute, is a function of one's ability to make decisions; as such it can be—at least to a certain extent—manipulated at will. For example, even though a rational agent is expected to maximize his knowledge of the relevant aspects of the situation he is in, a voluntary unilateral disruption of communication can be of advantage. Kidnappers who, after threatening to kill the hostage unless their demands are met, are known to sever all communication with the outside world, render themselves impervious to counterthreats, effectively shifting the responsibility for the victim's life onto the black-mailed family.

How could the Pentagon's underground community deform and degenerate to this point, imprisoned by walls which do not exist, by commands which are never given, by rules which are not enforced by anybody—in short, by the Building's interpersonal strategic thinking gone amok? One of the decisive factors in the evolution of the Pentagon's inner equilibrium must have been its isolation from the outside world. Built a few decades before the paper calamity, the Building ceased to function only “in the seventy-second year of its retreat from the world” (15). Left to itself, the giant organism had erased traces of outside influence only gradually, by a series of micro-steps, imperceptible in their accumulation. Naturally, there was nobody at the helm of the entire process. The Building evolved towards its homeostatic equilibrium through the stochastic multitude of interactions among its lower order elements (departments, sections, individual agents).

On the pages of Science Fiction and Futurology, Lem offers a condensed analysis of certain aspects of experimental sociodynamics. His discussion of the “stochastic character of sociodynamic transformations as the presence of certain critical points of group instability” indicates that, spread over sufficient time, the introduction of certain catalytic factors can very likely result in the type of situation depicted in Memoirs.¹⁷ In Science Fiction and Futurology Lem uses as his database the factual material from the Nazi occupation of wartime Poland. He identifies several key elements, among them isolation, psychological stress, permanence, and presence of an antagonist, which can contribute to the gradual erosion of group rationality. In Memoirs this hypothesis finds its way into a fictional model which extends its applicability to the realm of the military and strategic.

It becomes clear that the presence of apparently normal, sensibly acting and interacting individuals does not translate automatically into the rational character of their communal macrostructure. This bewildering conclusion is independently confirmed by game-theoretical postulates as well as scant empirical research. Indeed, it could be argued that one of GT's most important contributions might be the insight that “a concept of individual rationality does not generalize in any unique or natural way to group or social rationality”—in fact, it “may not even be consistent with it.”¹⁸ As with nuclear doomsday machines, considerations of military strategy can lead to circumstances where human actions, free in principle, appear to be dictated by the seemingly inflexible edicts of strategically preferred outcomes.

Memoirs, alongside other of Lem's works—e. g. Fiasco—is a model of such a perverse situation, exposing the degenerate logic of military espionage. After all, the Building's strategy of avoiding commitment to any Mission, despite all outward marks of dissipation, irrationality and impotence, is sensible as an extreme variant of Hamlet's “madness in method” or “method in madness.” Idiocy, futility, and madness are thus rooted in sheer strategic inertia which can perpetuate itself without any act of volition or deliberate design, simply out of the recognition of its profound military impotence. Whether the strategic scenario is the 1960s' grotesque world of Dr. Strangelove, or the 1990s' satirical modernity of Whoops! Apocalypse!, this shocking conclusion is a grim condemnation of the Cold War of our recent past, and a telling analysis of some of the circumstances that can attend on military strategies in general.

5. THE MISSION GAME: MATRIX AND SOLUTION

After discussing group rationality it is only fit to examine its “atomic” component, i. e. the strategic considerations of the individual agents of which the macro-picture is composed. The link is important, as the strategic configuration between the Building and its Communist counterpart is partly mirrored by the conflict between the Building and its newest recruit, Agent. Before I draw the matrix for the Mission Game, I would like to encourage the reader to resist the feeling that this short section may be too difficult or arcane for him to understand. The concepts used here are relatively simple game theoretic applications which should be intelligible to anybody willing to follow attentively the theoretic exposition. All the same, I invite all readers who may initially find the type of analysis in this section too unfamiliar to return to it later, armed with the insights and understanding from the subsequent interpretation of the matrix.

Let us recall the ordering of respective preferences in the Mission game. Agent's preferences in his conflict with the Building are (from best to worst):

4. The Building provides Mission (M); Agent pursues Mission (P).

3. The Building provides Mission (M); Agent does not pursue Mission (-P).

2. The Building does not provide Mission (-M); Agent pursues Mission (P).

1. The Building does not provide Mission (-M); Agent does not pursue Mission (-P).

The Building's preferences in this conflict are:

4. Do not provide Mission (-M); Agent pursues Mission (P).

3. Do not provide Mission (-M); Agent does not pursue Mission (-P).

2. Provide Mission (M); Agent pursues Mission (P).

1. Provide Mission (M); Agent does not pursue Mission (-P).

The rankings used are strictly ordinal: the numbers are only a convenient expression of the relation “is preferred to,” and should not be understood at any point as having any comparative value. In the matrix “M” denotes the giving (existence) of the Mission, and “-M” its absence. Similarly, for Agent's moves, “P” denotes his pursuing of the Mission, and “-P” not pursuing.

In view of Agent and the Building's respective preferences, the situation in which they find themselves is represented by the following matrix:

(x, y)=(the Building's payoff, Agent's payoff)

(4–best outcome, 3–next base, 2–next worst, 1–worst)

Although the (coming into) existence of Agent's Mission presumably precedes his summons to the Building, since Agent is initially unaware of the Building's choice in this matter, one could assume both players’ moves to be simultaneous. More properly, however, the situation should be depicted as a metagame, where the Building has the first move and Agent's response is contingent upon the Building's play.¹⁹ The game tree for the Mission game, which represents the complete sequence of the players’ moves and responses to these moves, would thus look like:

It should be noted that the game tree does not include information sets. Even though we can safely assume that in the beginning Agent has no knowledge of the Building's choice, the events of the following days make it increasingly obvious to Agent that he will never get to see his Mission, thus allowing him to reconstruct the Building's decision. As I mentioned earlier, despite multiple encounters with his immediate superior, Major Erms, who is supposed to be in possession of Agent's Mission, the protagonist never learns its contents. Despite Agent's repeated attempts to confide in various functionaries, e. g. Major Erms, the Admiradier, the pale-faced spy, or the doctor from the Medical Section, none of them offers him any useful advice. Instead they seem to take advantage of his naivete and sincerity. On top of everything, after his bizarre lecture session with Captain Prandtl, Agent comes to suspect a presence of unfathomable layers of codes and ciphers in every aspect of the Building's operations, which effectively nixes his chances of successful communication with anybody in the Pentagon, and thus of discovering his Mission.

These considerations make the omission of information sets from the analysis harmless. At the same time it significantly simplifies the analysis which, otherwise, would have to include two games, one in which Agent knows, and the other in which he does not know the Building's choice. In order to distinguish between a move and a strategy, the matrix of the 2x2 game can now be expanded to a 2x4 metagame, where the Building has two strategies and Agent has four. Agent's four choices, completely describing his contingencies foreseeable from the Building's opening move, are as follows:

(P/P) Pursue Mission regardless.

(-P/-P) Do not pursue Mission regardless.

(P/-P) Tit-for-tat strategy: pursue Mission if it exists, do not pursue if does not.

(-P/P) Tat-for-tit strategy: do not pursue Mission if it exists, pursue if does.

(x, y)=(the Building's payoff, Agent's payoff)

(4, 2)=(weakly dominant payoff)

(4–best outcome, 3–next base, 2–next worst, 1–worst)

The matrix is persuasive in offering a solution to the conflict. The Building should definitely not play M, since all of its M choices are dominated by -M. In these circumstances, where the Building's hand is “forced,” so to say, to choose -M, Agent's best option is to play either P/P or -P/P, which dominate all of his remaining options. All the same, since P/P weakly dominates -P/P (in the event of the Building changing his strategy), P/F emerges as the solution to the game. The solution can be regarded as stable since neither player profits from a unilateral change of strategy. Since the actual choices made by the players in the novel coincide with the solution to the Mission game, it again confirms the—however unlikely at first—assumption of the subjective rationality of both players’ moves.

6. MISSION AS LIFE: QUO VADIS HOMINE?

What does it mean that it is not irrational for Agent to try to pursue his Mission under the assumption that he will never learn anything about it? How are we to interpret this undying commitment to the Mission, this loyalty to the lost cause, this devotion to the quest which, by its very nature, will never end? A partial answer is suggested by Stoff through a bluntly allegorical interpretation of the novel's principal symbols. In his exegesis, “the Building is the World, the Gate is the Truth, and the ‘thrice accursed’ Mission is the human fate.”²⁰ This interpretation of Memoirs as a parable of human existence has an obvious sanction in the foreknowledge which the Building so consistently exhibits in its dealings with Agent. Whatever unpredictable scheme the protagonist comes up with, the course of events leaves little doubt that somehow it must have been anticipated by the Building.

In the first scene, where Agent pays an unplanned visit to Commanderal Kashenblade, he is greeted with a casual “So there you are,” as if his impulsive decision to try the first door on the floor level with “the highest concentration of tall, grey officers” (18) was expected by the Chief. Later on, the feeling of the Building's omni-science becomes so overwhelming that the protagonist becomes relieved to find out that he has made a genuine mistake in identifying an office number, thus depriving “them” of ability to predict all of his moves. However, father Orfini's explanation after the drunken party robs him of even the last shreds of confidence in his autonomy of choice. The priest-spy informs him that everybody at the party had been working for the Department—including the protagonist himself. When the incredulous Agent protests his innocence, Orfini reveals to him the full extent of the Building's ability to manipulate him at will.

The coffee they threw in your face, remember? The sugar in it made you sticky, and that necessitated a shower, which in turn enabled them to remove your clothes and accustom you to moving about in a bathrobe, and from a bathrobe to pajamas the transition is not so great. … Besides the doctor would have never dared to hand you over to Dolt—without orders. So you see, everyone, yourself included, was of the Department.

(171)

We can observe a symmetry between Agent, who has to assume that all of his moves are known to the Building, and the Building which finds itself in the exactly same position in relation to the Anti-Building. Where the Building adopts a random strategy to deal with its Communist counterpart, Agent intuitively follows the same course of action in his search for the Mission. The result of Agent's struggle, however, is a clear defeat, at least in terms of his preferences; no matter what he does (or decides not to do), it does not better his position vis-à-vis the Building.

In this light, Agent's suicide is more than just a termination of his engagement with the Building. In the Building there really is no way out but Death. In this sense the fate of the protagonist has indeed been determined “already at the moment when he has stepped past the Building's threshold, since there is no other way out of it but Death.”²¹ Suicide is Agent's sole means of stepping out of the game which, inside the confines of the nether world, he is condemned to play on the Building's terms. Unless the Building changes its strategy—and the payoff matrix suggests there is no inducement for it to do so—Agent's destiny is always going to be his second worst payoff. But the decision to commit suicide and accept the (3, 1) payoff instead, indicates a dramatic change in Agent's preferences.

The explanation lies in the matrix of the Mission game and the corresponding lowering of the Building's payoff, following Agent's change of strategy. It vindicates a hypothesis that Agent's decision was, in fact, taken to take revenge on the Building by lowering the latter's payoff which, following Agent's suicide, shifts from (4) to (3). This deeply pessimistic final act indicates that Agent has until the end remained a slave to his animistic world-view. Convinced of his defeat by the surrounding world, in reality it is Agent who defeats himself. In some respects he is much like Lem's other Hemingway-esque heroes from the 1960s—police inspector Gregory from The Investigation, scientist Kelvin from Solaris, astronaut Bregg from Return from the Stars, Navigator Rohan from The Invincible, mathematician Hogarth from His Master's Voice, and to a certain extent even pilot Pirx and the quixotic Tichy.²² In all of these figures Lem portrays men who are essentially and existentially alone. Unlike his counterparts, however, Agent surrenders to what he perceives as the intentional cruelty of the world. His suicide is a final stab into the Building's heart—a futile gesture of a man who cannot accept the world's lofty indifference to the pathos of his solitude.

Memoirs captures the Beckett-like absurdity of the spying game which effectively reduces all individually rational agents to pawns on the chessboard of a higher strategic plane. It is a sobering thought that even in the midst of other seekers, whose experience may be, for all we know, identical in its aggravating fruitlessness, the game must still be played out in isolation. The novel paints a picture of individuals condemned by their rationality to solitude. Every man is forever “infernally alone” in his allegorical quest for the Mission—a lifelong task which, in the work's harsh symbolical exegesis, makes “no sense, no sense to anyone …” (99).

We can ask at this point what kind of game, irrespective of one's strategy, can result in the subjective impression of seemingly predetermined and immutable outcome? The answer/metaphor that leaps to mind is “a game of Life”—so much so, that it is no surprise that, when Agent steals a glance at the copy of his Mission, he sees only a verbatim report of his life story in the Building. It is inevitable that Agent should never get to see his Mission which, as the matrix implies, most likely did not exist at all. Mission as Life is an experience in real time, played out in full despite our frantic attempts to cast a glance ahead. The protagonist's escalating frustration at the futility of his quest is an understandable reaction of a man who paranoidly tries to outfox the perceived Builder of his fate, refusing to believe that he carries it in his own hands (in the form of a yellow folder).²³ It is only appropriate that, upon examination, the folder reveals only blank pages. Agent's fate, predetermined or not, will always remain to him a tabula rasa, whether he is ready to accept it or not. This scene alludes to another of Lem's contemporary works, Hospital of Transfiguration, where looking at a grand opus of the poet Sekulowski (which bears the title “My World”!), the protagonist discovers only blank pages. …²⁴

The Game of Life invokes the important theme of the coincident inevitability and untenability of the anthropomorphic bias intrinsic to most, if not all, human conceptual endeavors. It is visible most plainly in Agent's unshakable belief that the whole world (in the guise of the Building) acts in concert against him. Agent (mis)construes the Pentagon's omnipresent randomness as a wilful manifestation of the world's metaphysical bias towards his existence. He is unwilling to cast away the last vestiges of positivist determinism, that “most natural of impulses, the primal wish to find the Cause, the Cause of the Effect, the Effect that in turn causes Action” (33). If Agent is humanity's allegorical Everyman, he represents in his allegiance to the Mission the atavistic belief in the order of things where human life is at the center of the Universe whose message to Man can be read out in its workings. His suicide is a challenge to the Building's world—a Godless world, in the sense that Agent's illusory grand design presupposes the Grand Designer.

The constant search in the world outside for meanings which are not even there, the painstaking exegesis of codes with which Nature tries to communicate absolutely nothing, the reading of signs which owe their existence only to the tireless labor of human culture—Memoirs contains them all. It is enough to recall Commanderal Kashenblade who, “acting like a child who thinks the names of the stars and planets are written on them,”²⁵ cries foul at the red shift in their spectrum; or the demented efforts of the Department of Codes whose tortured logic dictates that, since everything contains potentially inexhaustible strata of meaning, everything is in code. Of course, if everything is in code then there is no code at all: there is no system of communication to provide an independent meta-level of comprehension—a clear reductio ad absurdum of such paranoid super-semantics.

Symbolically, the position of Prandtl & Company is, in effect, not that dissimilar to the efforts of most early cultures designed to domesticate the ambient world through various forms of personification (totemism, animism). The protagonist's behavior is a good example of such incurable paranoia which makes him seek hidden messages in every detail of his wanderings. Retracing all adventures in his mind, he falls into the trap of inventing more and more complex theories to justify the unjustifiable and explain the inexplicable. Agent is indeed a perfect embodiment of human limitations, never more apparent than when he persists in believing that there exists Someone whom he can ask, “What do you want me to do” (63), and when he refuses to accept the answer to which he is forever condemned: “There will be no answer” (67).

7. THE BUILDING AS THE WORLD: IN SEARCH OF MEANING

Memoirs is also a sustained metaphor for human cognition. The protagonist's obdurate efforts to fathom his Mission reflect the search conducted by science for answers to, as Stoff puts it, “the fundamental questions about the character and sense of the world, about Man's place and destiny in it.”²⁶ After all, the infinitely complex and inscrutable Building is the World, autonomous and complete in itself. The purpose of existence in it—the search for Mission, apparently necessitated by very fact of finding oneself in the Building—is the pursuit of knowledge which would explain its workings to the minds trapped in it. Encoded in the language of scientific, philosophical, and religious formulae, the accumulation of such lore becomes the primary cultural justification of existence in the world—perhaps even a Pascalian goal in itself. The knowledge that Agent pursues bears, however, the teleological stigma of his epistemological paranoia: the Mission he seeks is one which will reveal to him the true intent of the Building. In this very assumption Agent represents the positivist fallacy common to scientific and philosophical systems toppled only by the theories of Brown and Heisenberg—the two physical concepts which Lem directly transposes to the social reality of Memoirs.

The collapse of the assurance with which the pre-20th century philosophy and science used to view the world created a cultural and spiritual void which still lies at the bottom of sporadic efforts to breathe new life into the dogma of a purposeful Universe. From the novel's symbolic perspective it is, nevertheless, inevitable that the Mission as Agent conceives it does not and cannot exist. The Building's completeness and indifference are like the real world's: its laws are nothing but a product of the Building itself. Its genius loci is an evolutionary stochastic median of the million daily transactions among its inhabitants, and not a result of some Grand Design—an imposition by a conscious entity, be it God or Big Brother. Agent is forever condemned to a state of uncertainty about the true meaning of the Building (if this concept can be considered meaningful at all). He can fashion various models of it for his strategic purposes as progressive heuristic approximations. No matter how accurate in providing him with a plan of action, their operational value cannot, however, underwrite any claims as to their teleological nature. Our knowledge of the world is by necessity always partial; even if all our theories today were true (I am sure that they are not), we would have no means of independently confirming such a claim.

Unlike, for example, mathematics, the empirical sciences are not straightforwardly cumulative—all of today's theories may be discarded tomorrow as better ones usurp their place. The old systems will be consigned to dark cellars or dusty attics of civilization: its galleries, museums, and libraries, housing the fossils which, like all obsolete tributaries to the sea of knowledge, dried out in the deserts of oblivion. The spying collection in Memoirs, crammed with every conceivable spying accoutrement past and present, the quasi-Borgesian library with shelves of completely outdated lore, or the hand-gallery, preserving its bizarre exhibits out of some ill-conceived sense of history—all remind of the endless fertility and teleological autonomy of human thought.

Memoirs plays out one of the themes which define Lem's fiction: the position of science in the face of the world which assumes active human participation directed towards understanding. The epistemological problems which Memoirs presents in the guise of Agent's symbolic quest are essentially the same as the dilemmas of Lem's other protagonists, from inspector Gregory in The Investigation (1959), to the crew of the Hermes in Fiasco (1987).²⁷ As the link between these works—a succession of mirror scenes where the protagonist, peering into the world outside, sees only his own reflection—warns, one must not commit a solipsistic folly and come to equate reality with one's perception of it.

The question of scientific realism versus constructivism cannot but bring to mind Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, released only one year after Memoirs. “The [scientist] who succeeds proves himself an expert puzzle-solver,” says Kuhn,²⁸ and in the only scene from Memoirs where Agent has a chance to observe a larger group of the Building's functionaries, there is “no conversation, not even about the food; they were busy solving puzzles instead” (37). As if to make sure that the connection between science and espionage will not be overlooked, one of Lem's super-spies comments on the semantics of the Roman word speculator. It turns out that “the scholar-explorer and the scout-agent” (152) have the same etymology—symbolically the spy and the scientist are united in a figure of an information seeker.

There is, however, a crucial difference between the orientation of the scientist and the spy. The former assumes that his object of inquiry is neutral, i. e. indifferent to his efforts, not the least because the epistemic practice of understanding the world is, as John Barrow describes it, “best done by believing that realism is true, even if in fact it isn't.”²⁹ On the other hand, the spy assumes that the information he seeks is not only of human origin, but may have been tampered with to thwart his task. The difference here is between epistemologically defensible moderate realism on the one hand, and unabashed constructivism on the other; between Lem's fundamental belief in the progressively more accurate picture of mind-independent reality, and Kuhn's plurality of constructivist paradigms.³⁰

8. EPILOGUE: THE INTRODUCTION

To complete the discussion of Memoirs we need to turn to its framing introduction, paradoxically better appreciated as an epilogue. The most striking aspect of the relation between the world of 3146 and the Third Pentagon is the lack of continuity between them. The alienating transformation is sketched by subtle details. The post-Neogene world has a different way of reckoning time; a subtraction of the 1680 years that the Pentagon had been buried under volcanic magma from the year 3146, when it had been unearthed by the archeologists, gives the absurd date of 1466 A. D. for the events of the memoir proper. The future scholars bear estranged proper names, such as Wid Wiss or Yoo Na Vac, which vaguely suggest an intellectronic lineage (cf. UNIVAC). In addition, the post-Neogene world has a different social organization, an advanced information-processing technology of “mnemonitrons and gnostors” (5), and an ability to send objects (chronoprobes) back in time. Lem spoofs the linguistic mannerisms of the future scholars into a semblance of a quasi-academic jargon which undercuts their pompous pretenses to the “true” nature of their theories. The generic joke, identifying archaeological chronoprobes from the future as today's UFO's, further caricatures the studiously scholarly tone. It seems safe to conclude that, contrary to its mock-assertive tone, the Introduction does not offer an adequate picture of the Neogene era during which the Building existed.

Lem anonymizes his protagonist into an Everyman and refrains from taking ideological sides (although the Pentagon is located in America, its habits and mannerisms are typically East European). In this way he can render a universal type of situation, instead of limiting himself to a politically specific one. His concern is our potential for succumbing to the madness of a strategic situation, the topic which finds an equally potent incarnation in his latest novel Fiasco (1987). Twenty six years after Memoirs, Lem uses the death of an alien race to model the (inevitable?) self-destruction of our species. In Fiasco, the planet Quinta is blown apart by collimated laser fire released by human scientists, who allow themselves to be dragged into local political disputes. In the disturbing finale, the protagonist, sent on a mission to establish contact and avoid the impending massacre, in a fit of fury and despair destroys the settlement of the alien race. In a catastrophic tangle of chance, deliberation, and misunderstanding, he also brings upon the planet the hell of the human crew's nuclear reprisal. Like all of Lem's novels, Fiasco offers a distressingly unflinching analysis of our contemporary times, not in terms of abstract ontological, moral, and ethical theories, but of the more immediate reality of our social and political life. Openly warning of the incessant threat from the armament race, just like in Memoirs Lem analyzes the volatile international balance of power. On Quinta the warring factions are locked in permanent and reciprocal blackmail by their military arsenals. Lem concludes that any chance disequilibrium in such fragile system—like the arrival of human emissaries of cosmic peace—can lead to its self-destructive planetary collapse, whether on Quinta, the fifth planet of its system, or Tertia, the third—our Earth.

Although our individual actions might be sane and rational, the antagonistic process into which we might be drawn can limit our effective choice to apparently only MAD (as in Mutual Assured Destruction) strategies. Memoirs does not so much take to task the madness of men, but of a group—an organization. It describes and derides the genius tempori of the period when humanity teetered on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe in the name of political and military strategies gone awry. It reflects the absurdity and paranoia of all ideological confrontations, and models the essence of group (ir)rationality which applies with equal force today when, after two global arms limitation treaties, the total strength of the world's nuclear arsenals is greater than ever before.

Still, it would be reductive to approach this complex work as a mere ideological pamphlet.³¹ Although unique among Lem's fictions—he has never published anything like it again—Memoirs is united with his other works by its deep concern for the future of the human race. As Michael Kandel has noticed, Lem's range of interest, although sophisticated and diversified, is fundamentally derivable from a limited number of central tenets (“Introduction” xvii). Memoirs is not only a key novel in Lem's entire literary career, but a novel-key to the problems which define him as an artist and philosopher of our difficult times. It is fair to describe them as centering on the critical analysis of humanity's new-found realm of technological might, and the consequent increase in the complexity of our cultural “games.” I can thus only hope that the present analysis will thus become the catalyst not just for the critical appreciation of this unique novel, but also for the complex cultural problems modelled in all of Lem's writings.

Notes

1. Trans. Michael Kandel and Christine Rose (New York: Avon, 1976).

2. Personal Interview, 23–24 June 1991. The full text of the interview is forthcoming in my The Lem Reader.

3. A conspicuous reason for a game theoretic approach to Lem is its very absence. The author has eloquently argued for the applicability of GT to literary studies in Filozofia Przypadku [Philosophy of Chance] (1968; Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1988). In this compendium on literary theory, Lem devotes three full sections to the methodological role of GT in criticism and scholarship (in Vol. 1: 136–41, and in vol. 2: 208–18 and 233–41). In the end, however, Lem dismisses his own appeals as “pious wishes, without any relation to real facts, to which one could count concrete applications” (240). In “Markiz w Grafie” [“The Marquis in a Graph”] (Teksty 43 [1979]: 7–42), he partially implements his program, harnessing GT to the analysis of the writings of Marquis de Sade. See also “Remarks Occasioned by Dr. Plank's Essay ‘Quixote's Mills,’” Science-Fiction Studies 2 (1973): 78–83, where Lem briefly discusses the “minimax tactics of creation” (79).

4. Powiesci fantastyczno-naukowe Stanislawa Lema (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1983), 105.

5. The single most accessible source on game theory to literary scholars is Morton D. Davis's Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction; Revised Edition (New York: Basic, 1983). Further material can be found in Steven Brams, Biblical Games (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), “Theory of Moves,” American Scientist 81 (1993): 562–70, “Game Theory and Literature” Games and Economic Behavior 6 (1994): 32–54; Morton D. Davis, The Art of Decision-Making (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986); Herbert De Ley, “The Name of the Game: Applying Game Theory in Literature” SubStance 55 (1988): 33–46; Shaun Hargreaves Heap, et al., The Theory of Choice: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992); R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey (New York: Wiley, 1957); Martin Shubik, Game Theory and Related Approaches to Social Behaviour; Selections (New York: Wiley, 1964), Game Theory in the Social Sciences: Concepts and Solutions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982); and J. D. Williams, The Compleat Strategyst (New York: McGraw, 1966). Other useful sources on game theory and strategic considerations of rationality are John C. Harsanyi, “On the Rationality Postulates Underlying the Theory of Cooperative Games” Journal of Conflict Resolution 5 (1961): 179–96, Rational Behaviour and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); John C. Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten, A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); Nigel Howard, Paradoxes of Rationality: Theory of Metagames and Political Behaviour (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); Paisley Livingston, Literature and Rationality: Ideas of Agency in Theory and Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games, and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), Two Person Game Theory: The Essential Idea (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964); James A. Schellenberg, Primitive Games (Boulder: Westview, 1990); Reinhard Selten, Models of Strategic Rationality (Boston: Kluwer, 1987), Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).

6. “Commander in Chief” in the English translation. In view of consistent inaccuracies in translation, I will sometimes depart from the English version published by Harcourt.

7. In “Chaos and Dialectic: Stanislaw Lem and the Space of Writing,” in Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Lem concedes as much himself in “Chance and Order” The New Yorker, Jan. 30, 1984: 88–98.

8. In Stanislaw Lem, trans. Krystyna Cekalska (Warsaw: Author's Agency, 1973), 137.

9. All further references to Memoirs are given parenthetically in the text.

10. On this point, see Stoff, Powiesci fantastyczno-naukowe Stanislawa Lema (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1983), 126.

11. (Jorge Luis Borges, “The Lottery in Babylon,” in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962), 32.

12. (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1970) 2:289.

13. Powiesci fantastyczno-naukowe Stanislawa Lema, 125. Stoff contradicts himself in Lem i inni (Bydgoszcz: Pomorze, 1990), when he refers to being “outside the Building's structure” (66).

14. The Gate scene is again more symbolic than realistic. Stoff makes essentially the same point in Powiesci fantastyczno-naukowe Stanislawa Lema, 125. For further analysis of this obvious allusion to Kafka, see J. Madison Davis's Stanislaw Lem (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont, 1990), and John Rothfork's “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub: Stanislaw Lem's Critique of Cybernetics” Mosaic 17 (1984): 53–71.

15. Martin Shubik, The Uses and Methods of Gaming (New York: Elsevier, 1975), 23.

16. The Strategy of Conflict, 16.

17. Memoirs, 268. The relevant section is 1:267–72.

18. Martin Shubik, The Uses and Methods of Gaming, 24.

19. For background on metagames, see Anatol Rapoport, The 2x2 Game (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 62 ff.

20. Powiesci fantastyczno-naukowe Stanislawa Lema, 125.

21. Balcerzak, Stanislaw Lem, 21.

22. For a useful background on Lem, see my “A Literary Monument Revisited: Davis’ Stanislaw Lem and Seven Polish Books on Lem,” Science-Fiction Studies 58 (1992): 411–17, “Of Games With the Universe: Preconceptions of Science in Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible” Contemporary Literature 35 (1994): 325–42, and The Lem Reader, forthcoming); also, Science-Fiction Studies 40 (1986); Science-Fiction Studies 57 (1992); Malgorzata Szpakowska, “A Writer In No-Man's-Land” Polish Perspectives 10 (1971): 29–37; Andrzej Ziembiecki, “‘… Knowing Is the Hero Of My Books …’” Polish Perspectives 9 (1979): 64–69; Stanislaw Beres, Rozmowy ze Stanislawem Lemem (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1987); Bernd Graefrath, Ketzer, Dilettanten und Genies: Grenzgaenger der Philosophie (Hamburg: Junius, 1993); Michael Kandel, “Lem in Review (June 2238)” Science-Fiction Studies 11 (1977): 65–68; Piotr Krywak, Stanislaw Lem (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1974).

23. The knitting secretary in the scene just after the folder incident reminds one of a scene in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where the knitting secretaries symbolize the Parkas, ancient goddesses believed to knit the threads of people's lives.

24. Hospital of Transfiguration (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992 [1955]).

25. Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice, trans. Michael Kandel (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983 [1968]), 20–21.

26. Powiesci fantastyczno-naukowe Stanislawa Lema, 126.

27. The Investigation, trans. Adele Milch (New York: Avon, 1976 [1959]); Fiasco, trans. Michael Kandel (San Diego: Harcourt, 1988 [1987]).

28. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 36.

29. The World Within the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 18–19.

30. On this topic see Richard N. Boyd, “On the Current Status of the Issue of Scientific Realism,” Erkentnis 19 (1983): 45–90; Edward Davenport “The Devils of Positivism,” in Literature and Science; Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), “The Scientific Spirit,” in Literary Theory's Future(s), ed. Joseph Natoli (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Hartry Field “Realism and Relativism” Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 333–56; Richard Miller, Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

31. It is unfortunate that critics like J. Madison Davis, still see it only in terms of a black humour satire. Even John Rothfork's ingenious reading of the novel as a critique of cybernetics falls short of doing justice to this complex work.