SOURCE: “Futurological Congress as Metageneric Text,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 13, Pt. 3, November, 1986, pp. 313–28.

[In the following essay, Philmus examines aspects of generic self-referentiality and the differentiation of real and imaginary worlds through language in The Futurological Congress. Philmus views Lem's novel as a continuation of H. G. Wells's conceptual experiment in The Time Machine.]

Most, perhaps all, of Stanislaw Lem's fictions are typically “modern” or “postmodern” in this respect (inter alia): they implicitly comment on the genre(s) in relation to which they define themselves. It might therefore seem grossly hyperbolic, if not downright false, to claim that Futurological Congress (1971) is unique in its generic self-consciousness.¹ Nevertheless, I shall argue that it is a text without parallel in the rest of Lem's opus, and not only in the degree to which it is generically self-reflexive but also in the way that it depends upon that kind of reflexivity. Unlike The Investigation (1959), or Solaris (1961), or Master's Voice (1968), say, it does not simply license us to translate its meaning into metageneric (i.e., generically self-referential) terms, these merely representing one level of significance, analogous to and reinforcing others which are at once more obvious and less dispensable.² Rather, it primarily demands a metageneric reading; that is, it obliges us to think of it in those terms if we would discover the integrity of the text.

In this and other regards, Futurological Congress can profitably be compared with The Time Machine. Both, first of all, have the sort of complexity which comes from an (apparent) overabundance of meaningful elements; and this, even without Futurological Congress's added complication of being difficult to follow literally, all but ensures that commentaries on them will be partial, and hence likely as not askew with one another. So it is that both texts are liable to be truncated, and thereby deformed, in their exegesis, particularly as a consequence of what makes them homologous: the enclosure of their common topos, an apocalyptic future, within a (relatively) present moment, the starting point to which the time traveller finally returns.

The many readings of The Time Machine which ignore its narrative frame at least impoverish the meaning of the fiction (if they do not misrepresent it altogether), and hence they obscure the book's further—and profound—resemblances to Lem's. As they in effect obliterate the fictively given context for the tale told in quotation marks, they automatically rupture the immanent connection between an empirical present and the imaginary future, whose relationship to historical actuality thereupon becomes uncertain, a matter for sociological (re)construction(s) based outside the text. That, however, is not the sense in which the Time Traveller's remark about the etiology of his own hypothesizing applies to the fiction in its entirety. “[T]he problems of our own age” from which the world of 802, 701 and beyond “proceed[s]” (The Time Machine; hereafter cited as TTM 8:81–82) do not exist exclusively outside the confines of The Time Machine; they are embedded and dramatized in its opening and penultimate scenes as these focus on the responses of the fictive audience to a Time Traveller who, by his vision as well as in the argument about the nature of time on which it is founded, “controvert[s] one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted” (1:2).³ The devolution which he is witness to, rather than being an arbitrary affront to his auditors’ bourgeois Victorian preconceptions about the future, dialectically originates in the closed-mindedness that their reactions variously exhibit. His vision, in other words, is the sort of antithesis that follows from, and details the consequences of, the lack of critical imagination which makes those representative types the prisoners of their ideological moment.

That vision, to be sure, obeys (Darwinian) laws of its own in its passage from the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks to the premonitory glimpse of the end of the Solar System.⁴ Yet its course also represents the “working to … [their] logical conclusion” (TTM 8:84) of premises which it contains and substantiates. What dictates that course is thus the very principle which generates the fantastic future from the realistic frame in the first place: the principle of self-extrapolation.

For this reason among others, The Time Machine has precisely the character its title gives it. The title immediately designates a device whose existence is purely chimerical; but ultimately it applies to the entire fiction as constituting just such a vehicle for transporting the reader in “time” (as the “dimension” “our consciousness moves along”: TTM 1:3) to an alternative (vision of the) world. It thus epitomizes the fiction that it names as an “invention”⁵ designed for the satiric and hortative purposes of exposing and counteracting the kind of mental immobility which figures in the narrative frame as the premise for the vision of the future. By the same token, the title also identifies and illustrates The Time Machine's manner of meaning. It bridges the would-be ontological chasm between an imaginary realm and the “real” (i.e., extratextual) world in the same way the fiction as a whole does: in and through its fictive self-referentiality.

This self-referentiality is fundamentally generic. The exact bearing that the text has on a world external to it in fact derives from its generic self-consciousness. Its discovery that “reality” is a deterministic mental construct from historically given assumptions comes by way of its examining the self-extrapolative nature of its own vision, the liberatory possibilities of which likewise inhere in the text's self-definition as it stakes out and explores its own generic space. The area it lays claim to is adjacent to that occupied by the 19th-century realistic novel, yet clearly demarcated from even the Dickensian variant of literary realism exemplified in its narrative frame. This alternative “dimension” it appropriates for the “scientific romance” by placing in it a vision which, morphologically considered, models the structural principles of that species and thereby offers itself as “a grammar of [SF] form.” Meanwhile, as the same vision reflects upon the present vis-à-vis the narrative frame, The Time Machine not only arrogates to itself the 19th-century literary-realist project of embodying “a criticism of fact”; it also justifies that take-over in generic terms by implicitly pointing to any empirically-bound mode of literary representation as lacking the “dimension” wherein an alternative world-view can be substantiated.⁶ In short, it does more than manifest an awareness of its literary operation and ethical vocation as time machine: it establishes (though it does not name) the genre to which it self-consciously belongs.

As a general rule, then, “all significant science fiction since Wells can be said to have come out of his Time Machine.”⁷ There is, however, a special—and perhaps singular—sense in which that proposition applies to Futurological Congress. Lem's text is not only a generic descendant of Wells's but its logical successor, extending its exploration of the nature of SF into the realm of language. The Time Machine, by my account of it at least, might even appear to be Futurological Congress's “precursor” in the Borgesian meaning of the word were it not the case that the two works elucidate one another.⁸Futurological Congress alerts us to the metageneric significance of The Time Machine, which in turn points to Lem's as a fiction whose meaning is governed by its title.

The coherence of Futurological Congress, like that of The Time Machine, resides in its being what it is superficially about. From beginning to end, it is literally Ijon Tichy's report of what happens to him at a certain futurological congress which he returns from “the stars” to attend (p. 7); and as such, it reads like some of the journalism of Norman Mailer, say, rewritten by Terry Southern. Yet it is equally true that Tichy's account of his experiences, for all of its (and their) idiosyncratic particularity, in effect constitutes the Congress which the revolution in Costa Ricana seemingly aborts, and constitutes it as the type or paradigm of any like gathering devoted to futurological speculation.

To be sure, the course of human events since 1971 has already obscured the speculative nature of parts of the fiction, especially in the early going. The promiscuous terrorism first surrounding and then irrupting into the Costa Ricana Hilton no longer seems comically hyperbolic, much to the consternation of Lem himself no doubt; and certain instances of it which he imagined have subsequently acquired equivalents in actuality that may make them appear unacceptable as the subjects even of (his) black humor. Such is the case both with the “extremists” who arrange for “individual teeth of their hostages” to be “delivered … to the [American] Embassy and various government offices, promising an anatomical escalation” (p. 4—which promise they fulfill: see pp. 7–8) and—perhaps to the Polish author's greatest dismay⁹—with the religious fanatic intent on “a great pilgrimage” to Rome “to gun down the Holy Father at St. Peter's basilica” (p. 6). Neither of these fictive incidents now appears to be quite of a piece with the form notice that Tichy finds by his bedside upon awakening in an “experimental state hospital,” for example: “Although it was found necessary to remove your arms, legs, spine, skull, lungs, stomach, kidneys, liver, other (circle one or more), rest assured that these mortal remains … were, with proper ritual, interred, embalmed, mummified, buried at sea, cremated … —thrown in the garbage (circle one) …” (p. 50; italics removed). This bureaucratic document, particularly in the hands of a Tichy who has just been reassembled as a “little black woman” (p. 51), indicates a state of affairs that still seems fantastically futuristic. By contrast, “Operation P” and the barbarism of Costa Ricana's political kidnappers might by now easily be mistaken for the kind of deliberate fictionalizing of contemporary history that the government of Futurological Congress's “banana republic” exemplifies in its policy towards its opponents.

Yet if the post hoc correspondences accruing to Lem's fiction have rendered some of its details mordantly satiric to a degree that he probably did not anticipate, they have also given those details an air of reality which reinforces the ontological distinction upon which Futurological Congress operates. To the extent that we follow Tichy's mental processes (as his narrative perpetually tempts us to do), we likewise try to differentiate the world of his waking perceptions from that of his dream-hallucinations, what is objectively the case from the merely imaginary.

It is on the basis of some such dichotomy, and perhaps with reference to a hypothesis about the etiology of dreams,¹⁰ that we perceive Tichy's psychochemically-induced visions as deriving (at least generally and in part) from what he has witnessed before he (increasingly) succumbs to hallucinogens. Thus, for example, the “real” hostage-taking incident involving two American diplomats has its oneiric counterpart in the kidnap of Dr. Fisher in the third of Tichy's hallucinatory episodes (p. 54); and in that same episode, the aerial and artillery bombardment of Nounas figures obliquely in the blowing up of the helicopter and then of the ambulance in which Tichy is being transported and reverberates directly in the “incessant thunder” that assails his ears at the outset (p. 45) and in the “explosion [which] rock[s] the [hospital] corridor” later on (p. 49).

Less recognizable in Tichy's imaginative transmutations of them are “the secretaries belonging to the Association of [Sexually] Liberated Publishers” (p. 8), “their limbs … painted with various op designs” (p. 25). They appear in the second hallucinatory sequence as the bird-women whose feathers he at first mistakes for some novel fashion; thence they become the basis for the sartorial peculiarities of the year 2039—“pedestrians … dressed like peacocks” (p. 68), “suits that continuously change in cut and color … and blouses that show you movies” (p. 70); and these in turn open out on the possibility which that future world offers of “chang[ing] completely one's size and shape, and face, in the beauty parlors and body shops” (p. 83)—a possibility reflecting back upon the identity crisis which seizes Tichy during his sojourn at the “experimental state hospital.”¹¹

Eventuating as it does in a vision of plasticity reminiscent of Dichotica's in Tichy's “21st Voyage,”¹² this last series of transformations exemplifies one of the (complex) ways in which Futurological Congress subverts the very distinction (between the hallucinative and the real) that it principally invokes. After all, the opportunity which 2039 affords for altering one's physical appearance at will (or at whim) belongs to a fantasy at least twice removed from the world of Tichy's waking experience: it arises out of his past hallucinations, which gradually take the place of “reality” as the source of his imaginative materials.

This sort of usurpation not only makes Tichy's hold on “reality” (along with our sense of it) ever more tenuous; it also renders his hallucinations increasingly self-reflexive. Indeed, the two tendencies occur in tandem as the simultaneous results of the principle by which the narrative moves, the process wherein one fantasy generates another.¹³ Their connection is perhaps most evident at the point when Tichy, noting for the first time that “just about everyone” in 2039 is “panting,” wonders: “Could I be imagining it?” (p. 72). The question recalls his previous doubts as to whether or not he is “hallucinating” (see, for example, pp. 37, 39, 42, 53, and 56); but here the issue is the accuracy of his perceptions, not the ontological status of the world to which they would apply. His doubts, in other words, now refer purely to a “fictifactual” realm (in Futurological Congress's fictifactual sense of that word: “dreams programmed to order” [p. 73]), which therefore contains them totally. Moreover, the hallucination that self-referentially encloses them by the same motion assimilates—and thus nullifies—their underlying distinction between the “real” and the “imaginary.”

Generally (as in this last instance), then, Tichy's hallucinations do not merely displace his waking concerns and thereby make his “real” world more and more remote. They also absorb the “reality” which they draw upon so as to reveal the speciousness of that very notion of his.

It is in this regard that the sewer “at the lowest level of the Hilton” (p. 34) becomes significant as something other than a reference point for discriminating one of Tichy's dreams from the next. His “guardian sewer, my only talisman and touchstone to reality” (p. 99) does, of course, serve the latter purpose: his fall into it marks the end of each of the five hallucinatory episodes subsequent to his bout with LTN (“Love Thy Neighbor”), which figures by way of a prologue to them.¹⁴ Yet thanks largely to its structural function, the sewer also stands as a metonym for Tichy's “real” world, which accordingly follows its vicissitudes.

Tichy's return to the sewer, as it becomes progressively less and less recognizable as such, likewise gradually ceases to take him back to “reality” even for a moment. The incident which punctuates the conclusion of his fourth hallucinogenic episode, for example, does not cause him to wake up in the subterranean regions of the Hilton; after being immersed in “liquid nitrogen” (p. 62), he instead cryogenically revives to another fantasy world. What is true in this case, however, is not nearly so obvious in regard to his passage from that 21st-century Utopia of Plenty to its dialectical opposite. Again the cloacal element intermediates between one hallucination and the next; but in this—the most crucial—instance, its oneiric transformation is so radical that its presence can easily be overlooked. Nevertheless, what precipitates him into the Anti-Utopia of Scarcity amounts to yet another fall into his “guardian sewer,” whose influence presides over this sordid futuristic possibility.

Tichy's “touchstone to reality” thus becomes thoroughly and inseparably part of the world which he seizes upon as the truth behind Utopian appearances. Yet in terms of the fictive given, he perceives that “truth” only after ingesting “up'n'at'm” (p. 114), a drug cognate to the “vigilax” which intricates him in a dream-world in the first place and which subsequently reappears as a means for furthering the deception; indeed, both substances surely belong to the family of “dehallucinides,” which “create the illusion that there is no illusion” (p. 130).¹⁵ Hence the unmasking of 2039 as the antithesis of the Utopia he originally apprehends it as being constitutes a kind of intellectual trompe-l’ oeil, despite the seeming parallel with the Time Traveller's discovery that his initial impression of having arrived in Utopia does not fit what is really going on in 802, 701. In other words, Futurological Congress encourages us to accept as “real” a state of affairs that is not only every whit as fantastic as the one which it apparently debunks, but is also otherwise deceptive precisely by reason of its giving the illusion of undeceiving us.

Once we stand back from and assess the “fictifacts” (again meaning “dreams programmed to order”), it becomes incontestable that this is so: that the anti-utopian vision of 2039 is no less hallucinatory than the Utopia of Plenty which it purports to supersede. Given their equality, Lem's project can be looked upon as being in some measure akin, say, to the Strugatskys’ in Roadside Picnic (1972) and Le Guin's in The Dispossessed (1974). He, too, resuscitates the Utopian Ideal in a manner which takes into account its literary and historical fortunes since the late 19th century—viz., its fall into disrepute, which perhaps reaches its nadir with the publication of 1984.¹⁶ He presents us with a world which incorporates in up-to-date terms (strongly inflected by his cognizance of the Drug Culture of the 1960s) many of the chief traditional attributes of Utopia: material abundance for all, a perpetually temperate climate, and so forth. Next he doubly qualifies that Vision of Plenty: first through Tichy's realization that it is drug-dependent and vulnerable to totalitarian abuse (see p. 79); then by making it seem a total, drug-induced illusion. Finally, having compromised it to a degree that prompts us to dismiss it altogether, Lem restores it as a utopian possibility by allowing us to understand the hallucinatory nature of Tichy's disillusionment with it.

While Futurological Congress's trompe-l'esprit thus serves as a strategy for reinstating, in ambiguous terms, a utopian vision, it does so largely by the way. Its main function, instead, is to further the process of “actualysis,” “[t]he breaking down, the eroding of reality” (p. 126). Following Tichy, we are led to believe that 2039's “apparitions” of “Paradise” conceal a “garbage dump” (p. 143), and an overcrowded garbage dump at that. Yet this “catatrashmic” insight differs crucially from its predecessors not in its ontological status but in its cognitive effect. As it, too, proves to be hallucinogenically based, the vision of “the foulness lurking behind” 2039's utopian “façade” (p. 104) contaminates the sewer out of which it comes with its unreality. The sewer that Tichy ultimately topples into is therefore no longer the “touchstone to reality” that it first appeared as being: interpenetrating with his dreams, it has, in the course of his narrative, become continuous with them.

The “eroding” of Tichy's “actuality” by at once displacing and absorbing it culminates in his final plunge into his “guardian sewer.” By that fall, he exposes the truth-claims of the Anti-Utopia of Scarcity as a hallucinatory pretense; but that, in turn, impugns the “reality” of the waking world underlying this last, cloacal vision, into which it slowly obtrudes as its metonymic sewer-self—a Return of the Repressed.¹⁷ At the conclusion of Futurological Congress, Tichy is thus left “shipwrecked” in an elemental “reality” (p. 143) which has ceased to be differentiatable from his fantasies as it flows “off into the unknown future” (p. 149) that they occupy.

Yet the “reality” whose very notional existence in the end becomes suspect has at best never been anything more than what the name Costa Ricana implies it is: a surrogate for the—or a—real world (sans quotation marks). Nor is its surrogate status as a realm discrete from Tichy's fantasies beyond the reach of the “actualytic” process at work outside their confines. There the “actualysis” operates not by distancing and assimilating his waking world, but by erasing the boundary lines between it and his hallucinations.

This erasure most obviously manifests itself, especially in contrast to the case with The Time Machine, on the level of mechanical structure. Neither chapter divisions nor anything else certainly marks Tichy's “actuality” off from his hallucinatory episodes, the first of which is situated right in the middle of what he takes to be the “real” world. That absence of a clearly delineated frame points in turn to a far more profound continuity, pertaining to the text's meaningful (not merely its literal) content.

As we accompany a Tichy who has come back from “the stars” to “the problems of Earth” (p. 1), we immediately enter a world that is deceptively familiar. Taking into account that 2039 is the year of the 76th Futurological Congress (p. 125) and that Tichy is attending the Eighth, and allowing for one such “World Assembly” per annum, we ought to be following him into a fictifactual present coinciding with the date of Futurological Congress's publication.¹⁸ Yet the moment on which the fiction opens has a “hencity” about it even now. The Costa Ricana Hilton, for example, has 106 floors (p. 2), and is otherwise of such vast dimensions that only “special dumbwaiters moving at supersonic speeds” could convey food so that it would arrive hot in the rooms farthest (“a mile and a half”) from the kitchen (p. 5). The hotel thus appears in “actuality” as the prototype of the apartment complex that Hayakawa, Hakayawa, and Yahakawa collectively envision—a complex so huge that “1,000 exits” would be insufficient for evacuating it (since “a whole new generation would reach maturity” within its confines in the meantime: p. 22).

This may count as the instance where the setting for the Congress and its reported proceedings come closest to one another. But it is not the only case in which the “real” scene comports with the type of speculation that Tichy and his colleagues have gathered to engage in. Indeed, as I have already noted, Costa Ricana offers (at least relative to 1971) any number of futuristic prospects, the most important of which (from the standpoint of what ensues) appear in the incidents involving LTN and other psychochemical agents.

Those goings on do not merely bear on the content as well as the course of the Eighth Futurological Congress. They also make for an obvious connection between Tichy's “reality” and his dream-worlds, and thence point to the latter as more than the psychological outcome of his conscious prehensions. His dreams, that is, become the logical extension of his “actuality”; indeed, the two realms are substantially continuous by reason of their participating in the same futurological project. Furthermore, the futurological prospects figured in Tichy's hallucinations, beyond being generically akin to those embedded in the frame narrative, all relate in one way or another to the specific question that futurologists are meeting in Nounas to address: what to do about impending global overpopulation.¹⁹

To be sure, Tichy's fantasies are not from the first entirely and directly responsive to that problem. In retrospect, however, we can see that his early episodes are the logical by-products of the alternative “solution” (Utopian versus Anti-Utopian) that Futurological Congress finally poses. This is certainly true in the general sense that either scenario necessitates (ex post facto, as it were) the kinds of hallucinogens responsible for all of Tichy's visions. But it is also true for a particular reason: that the dream-worlds he goes through before coming to the Utopia of Plenty represent (some of) the consequences tangential to or contingent on that “cryptochemocracy” and its antithesis. Thus, for example, Tichy's arborial fantasy looks ahead to the opportunities for psychophysical freedom available to the denizens of 2039;²⁰ at the same time, it points to the identity crisis which such freedom must entail—a crisis otherwise configured in the bureaucratically impersonal reconstruction of Tichy as a “little black woman” and reconfigured, in advance, via the team of Japanese futurologists, whose anagrammatically-cloned names inflect that identity crisis back towards its source in the population explosion, which is responsible for their onomastic absurdity. Similarly, the oneiric sequences wherein Tichy is spirited away in sundry vehicles that soon crash or explode (pp. 40, 43) and is then executed by Costa Ricanan government frogmen (pp. 59–60) expatiate upon the futurological prospects of a world which would deal with overpopulation by psychotechnological means. Such details, however, anticipate not 2039's potentialities for utopian liberation but what comes with them: the licentious possibilities for terroristic violence and repressive political control endemic to the Utopia of Plenty and the Anti-Utopia of Scarcity alike as “chemocratic”—which is also to say, technocratic—societies. The early instances of Tichy's being victimized and manipulated thus tie in, say, with the assault on his person by a “physivisional” “interferent” (p. 75) and with the “[t]orturometry[,] … tyrannology, brutalistics” and other forms of vicarious sadomasochistic satisfaction rife in 2039's ambiguous utopia; and, in its anti-utopian sequel, with the enforced use of “mascons” and “supermascons” and with the Grand Inquisitorial revelations on Symington's part that the increasing prominence of those drugs prepares for (p. 145).

This involvement of Tichy's hallucinatory worlds in one another has a basis in language, as does the mutual connection between them and his “actuality.” Indeed, the continuity which his dreams have with his “real” world—manifest through their common depiction of various futurological possibilities answerable to the problems attendant upon overpopulation—is fundamentally linguistic. Professor Trottelreiner serves to indicate as much by his discourse on “futurolinguistics”—“Morphological forecasting! Projective etymology!” (p. 108). His declension of the word trash into “[t]rashmass, trashmic, catatrashmic,” and ultimately “trashmos,” for example (p. 111), suggests itself as the source of the futuristic vision of the world-as-overpopulated-garbage-dump which immediately follows. Furthermore, it does so “syntagmatically,” or structurally, as well as in respect to the putative meaning of Trottelreiner's imaginary words. His sequence, that is, constitutes an analogue to the narratological process, already observed, whereby one fantasy leads to—i.e., generates—another.

By the same token, however, Trottelreiner's remarks imply that his “futuro-linguistic” exercises represent not only a process of thinking parallel to that in which futuristic fantasies originate, but also the very mental workings which give rise to them. That, at least, is the conclusion which Futurological Congress compels us to come to about itself, and for reasons additional to those I have just touched upon.

The first of these stems from the fact that the substance of the Professor's disquisition does not come out of the blue. It is foreseeable the moment Tichy leaves the “revivificarium” and confronts 2039 as a linguistically strange and novel world, whose “key concept” (he right away discovers) “is psychem” (p. 67). The attention which he focusses on “new word[s]” (p. 66) in turn looks back to the opening pages of the fiction and the talk there about “cryptochemocracy” (p. 27) and the various “benignimizers” and “phrensobarbs” subservient to such a scheme (p. 15). In thus giving those neologisms the prominence which they deserve, we instantly become aware that they, so to speak, encode the prospects which Futurological Congress ultimately explores.

This, in context, is the point of Trottelreiner's theorizing as it applies particularly to Futurological Congress: that Lem's fiction spells out at length the implications of the neologisms which are its genesis.²¹ What qualifies it as a metageneric text, however, has to do with its self-consciousness of its neologistic operation rather than with that operation per se. This self-consciousness is what Trottelreiner's remarks by their mere presence make evident as they otherwise extend the fiction's genetic principle to all futuristic fantasies and thereby indicate the common ground of SF and futurology.²²

Characteristically enough, Lem allows us ample room to doubt how far beyond itself Futurological Congress's metageneric claims apply; we may even wonder in what sense they hold true for that text. After all, he gives their express formulation over to a Professor whose name translates into “complete idiot” and who retails them to a principal bearing a cognomen that is the Polish equivalent of “Gulliver.” These nominal facts, apart from their self-deprecating irony, should cause us to be hesitant about ascribing to Lem the view that all SF actually has a neologistic origin. That, as pure theory, might be applicable to Futurological Congress itself only a posteriori, in which case it would be true in effect rather than literally as an account of the text's actual conception.²³ Moreover, the skepticism attendant on the proposition that all SF is originatively neologistic also attaches to its chief corollary: that thinking in terms of neologisms is the source of SF and futurology alike as the two intersect in their shared project of modelling the future.

The doubts which Lem permits us do have a limit though. We may balk at the text's would-be revelations about the generative principle uniting SF and futurology, especially when they are put in starkly propositional form; and we may be all the more reluctant to universalize them in view of Lem's own strictures, elsewhere expressed, to the effect that they obtain only in the highest—i.e., most self-aware—reaches of those two disciplines.²⁴ What we cannot do, except at the certain risk of fragmenting and misinterpreting his text, is dismiss Futurological Congress's putative findings altogether.

Their dismissal is out of the question for two reasons. First, as I have been saying in other words, they amount to a generic self-discovery figured in the very substance of the fiction. In discounting them, we must therefore overlook a meaning of the text, and one which, for a reason I am now coming to, links up with the fiction's assault on the ontological distinction between the real and the imaginary. This skeptical operation, which we have been observing in regard to dream-worlds continuous in their problematic content with the “reality” that they emanate from, also takes place on the level of language. Indeed, the neologisms incorporated in the frame narrative not only anticipate Tichy's subsequent futurological hallucinations; they also, and at the same time, infiltrate his “actuality,” thereby subverting its pretensions to that distinct status so fundamentally as to make the cognate enterprise of his fantasy-worlds appear epiphenomenal, if not almost redundant. This second reason for taking the text's metageneric revelations seriously thus has to do with the fact that as self-discoveries they are intimately a part of (though analytically separable from) Futurological Congress's chief cognitive project: that of ideational deconstruction.

Such a project as Lem engages in it is generally comparable to that of the text he certainly had in mind when writing Futurological Congress: not The Time Machine, but Ubik (1969).²⁵ The paranoia which finally takes hold of Lem's “defrostee” in his confrontation with Symington (pp. 144ff.), like much else about the fantasy world of Tichy's wherein “Procrustics, Inc.” looms larger and larger, is surely reminiscent of that work by Philip K. Dick in particular, as is the trompe-l'esprit which gulls us into believing that in the anti-utopian garbage dump we at last get to what is really going on in 2039. Nevertheless, there is a radical difference in what the two authors are ultimately about. Ubik, to say the least, casts grave doubts on the objective existence of any world as it relentlessly demonstrates that our ubiquitous notions of what is “real” are nothing more than projections—and idiosyncratically deranged projections at that—of a sort susceptible to being commodified and marketed by corporate-conglomerated capitalism. Lem, on the other hand, designs Futurological Congress to expose the speciousness of the distinction between the “real” and the “imaginary.” After inviting us to fall in with their antithesis, his fiction proves that the two categories cannot stand opposed as human beings concretely think of them because so conceived they perforce enter into, and are subsumed by, the “imaginative.” That, however, is for Lem an objective truth about our human subjectivity. Furthermore—and this is where he differs most from Dick—it is a truth which, as we become aware of it through a consciousness of language and of linguistic possibilities, can vouchsafe an intimation of what may lie beyond our (present) mental confines, beyond the categories that language in our obliviousness to it imprisons us in.²⁶

This is surely the matter that Futurological Congress is finally directed towards. The fiction does more than live up to the dual promise of its title by constituting the specific congress that Ijon Tichy is attending as the type of all such symposia devoted to venting futurological speculation. As well, it reflects on how it is able to do so, and through that metageneric consciousness offers itself as a critical commentary on SF in general—or rather, on SF in its honorific designation. Nor does its discovery about its own generic possibility suggest itself as a paradigm applicable only to the likes of The Time Machine and Ubik, with their “Eloi” and “Morlocks,” “anti-precogs,” “inertials,” and “half-lifers.” The neologistic process that it incorporates and draws attention to as its own model and logical source also stands as the common denominator between SF and futurology; and these by their connection appear as exemplary realms for the kind of imaginative thinking capable of transcending such linguistically imposed antinomies as that of the “real” versus the “imaginary.”

This way out of what must otherwise be our conceptual prison is no mere abstraction in Futurological Congress. It is particularized in the imaginative worlds which make up the fiction. These mediate between the present and an alien future as they self-consciously exhibit language—and with it, human thought—neologistically extending itself into “the unknown”; and in so doing, they reveal the limits of “reality” as we unreflectively conceive it.

In effect if not deliberately, Lem thus resumes the cognitive project that Wells inaugurated and, pursuing it to its modular foundations in language, discloses that it essentially involves the kind of neologistic investigation which is properly the province of Futurological Congress-as-SF. The fiction's cognitive discovery is for that reason also a generic self-discovery—a congruence which confirms Wells's original metageneric insight as he embodied it in The Time Machine.

Notes

1. As the reader of this essay of mine will presently discover, I have not dropped the definite article from an English rendering of Kongress futurologiczny merely because it does not appear in the original. My reasons additionally—and chiefly—have to do with what I perceive as Lem's exploitation of an ambiguity inherent in Polish grammar, which calls for no article whatever in this case (wherefore the English addition of “A” would be as proper—or unjustified—as “The” is).

   I have also deviated from the text English readers will be familiar with in regard to the name of the (imaginary) country in which the events of Futurological Congress transpire. Recognizing that there is something to be said for “Costa Rica” (which encourages the illusion of a situation in the real world), I have nevertheless gone back to Lem's text (mainly on the grounds that “Costa Ricana” indicates the imaginary status of the setting even as it also points us towards a real place).

   Apart from those two exceptions, I have followed Michael Kandel's translation, in its latest bibliographic incarnation (San Diego, NY, & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985)—which, be it noted, differs in its pagination (but little else) from the 1976 Avon Paperback.

2. Here I particularly have in mind Mark Rose's persuasive metageneric reading of Solaris: see his Alien Encounters (Cambridge, MA: 1981), pp. 82–95.

3. My citations from The Time Machine refer to the chapter:page(s) of the first English edition, published by Heinemann in 1895. I should also add that what I am saying in this present essay of mine about Wells's text comes out of my previous work on it, beginning with a piece in PMLA (May 1969) reprinted in somewhat revised form as “The Logic of Prophecy in The Time Machine”: see H. G. Wells, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1976), pp. 56–68.

4. The other external laws operative in the course of The Time Machine's vision of the future—the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Theory of Tidal Evolution propounded by “the younger [i.e., G. H.] Darwin” (TTM 8:76)—prove subservient to Charles Darwin's.

5. The Wellsian meaning of “invention” is close to what Kingsley Amis intends his “idea” to signify. See Wells's “Preface to The Scientific Romances” (in H. G. Wells's Literary Criticism, ed. Patrick Parrinder & myself [Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980], pp. 241ff.) and Amis's New Maps of Hell (1961; NY: New English Library, 1969), pp. 118–19.

6. I am bringing together, in a way which gives a slightly different meaning to both, Darko Suvin's argument in “A Grammar of Form and a Criticism of Fact: The Time Machine as a Structural Model for Science Fiction” and Patrick Parrinder's in “News from Nowhere, The Time Machine, and the Break-Up of Classical Realism.” The former is most accessible in H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction, ed. Suvin & myself (Lewisburg, PA & London: 1977); the latter can be found in SFS, 3 (1976):265–74.

7. Here again I have inserted a phrase of Suvin's (this time taken from his Introduction to the volume just cited, p. 29) in a context which alters its meaning: he emphasizes the point that The Time Machine stands as an ideological paradigm for the SF subsequent to it, whereas I am drawing attention to its significance as a generically self-conscious text.

8. Borges, by his seemingly paradoxical statement that “each writer creates his precursors,” is calling attention to and emphasizing the fact that authors contemporary with us influence, and alter, our understanding of those in the past. Presumably the Argentine would also acknowledge the influence to be bilateral; see his “Kafka and his Precursors,” in Other Inquisitions, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (NY: Washington Square Press, 1966), pp. 111–13.

9. Lem indicates his misgivings, in the “P. S.” to his interview with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, in these terms: “Futurological Congress is a depressing tale, but told funnily—i.e., with black humor”; “the mass starvations of the Third World” “will only intensify,” “because no local relief action will overturn the general trend. It is this type of implication that is hidden below the humorous surface of … Futurological Congress, which now reads rather strangely for me, for it feels much less fantastic (and thus, less entertaining) than when I wrote it” (pp. 255, 257 above).

10. Here and elsewhere (most notably in The Investigation) Lem allows us to accept either Freud's or the behavioral psychologist's view of what count as dream stimuli—perhaps not surprisingly, since their respective etiologies are not in this area wholly incompatible.

11. Tichy's question upon seeing “himself” reflected in a mirror as a “little black woman”—“Who was I then?” (p. 51)—articulates an identity crisis which subsequently finds expression in collective terms: see his diary entry for Aug. 8, 2039, with its passage about “humanity … torn by the contradiction between the old cerebralness … and the new” (p. 67).

    This aspect of Futurological Congress's meaning (which I touch upon again later on) signals a recurrent thematic preoccupation of Lem's, figuring perhaps most prominently in Tichy's “21st Voyage” but never far from the center of significance in Lem's other fictions. On this point both in itself and in its relation to language as a medium of (self-)discovery, see my essay on “The Cybernetic Paradigms of Stanislaw Lem,” in Hard Science Fiction, ed. George E. Slusser & Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: 1986), pp. 177–213, 263–70.

12. This “Voyage” of Tichy's can be found in English translation in The Star Diaries, trans. Kandel (NY: Avon, 1976), pp. 194–256.

    This parable of Lem's, which he refers to as “one of my most ‘teleologically’ serious works, one that I personally attach great importance to” (see above, p. 256), ties in with the significance of 2039's “body shops” and, even more, to Tichy's report of the “most interesting discussion” he has with “Father Modulus, a monk of the Nonbiologican order,” regarding that order's missionary activities among intelligent machines (FC, pp. 94–95). That passage, like much else about the Utopia of Plenty, evinces a concern with the ethical implications of “auto-evolution” that Futurological Congress shares with Tichy's “21st Voyage” (which focusses on the subject); the two texts also are thereby related to the hypothetical example of the second type of SF that Lem outlines in “Metafantasia: The Possibilities of Science Fiction” (SFS, 8 [1981]:54–55).

13. In regard to its self-generative principle, Futurological Congress bears a strong resemblance to the “Tale of the Three Story-Telling Machines of King Genius” (for which, see The Cyberiad, trans. Kandel [NY: Avon, 1976], pp. 144–200).

    The connection between that principle and Futurological Congress's assault on the distinction between “reality” and “dream” is pointed to in the following passage from “The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius”:

    … it would seem that reality, or actuality, exists, and also dream. But [‘in keeping with Ockham's razor’] the hypothesis of reality is unneeded. So, then, dream [alone] exists. But … the postulation of someone dreaming is—again—an unnecessary hypothesis, for it sometimes happens that in a dream another dream is dreamed. Thus everything is a dream dreamt by a succeeding dream, and so on to infinity. Now because … each succeeding dream is less real than the one preceding (a dream borders directly on reality, while a dream dreamed within a dream borders on it indirectly, through that same intermediate dream, and the third through two dreams, and so on)[,] the upper bound of this series equals zero.

    (Mortal Engines, trans. Kandel [NY: Seabury Press, 1977], p. 135)

    This “proof” of the validity of “neantics” also, of course, bears on the meaning of Tichy's dreams as they usurp the place of his “reality.”

14. The five hallucinatory episodes subsequent to the one set in the middle of the frame narrative I distinguish (on the basis of Tichy's return to the sewer, literally or figuratively) as follows: (2) while observing sewer rats walking erect, Tichy discovers that he has been metamorphosed into a human tree and is presently assailed by “bird-women” (pp. 38–45); (3) meaning to flee to the Futurological Congress, which Trottelreiner alleges is reconvening in Berkeley, Tichy winds up in an “experimental state hospital” (pp. 45–54); (4) he is executed by Costa Ricanan government frogmen and then returned to a (the same?) hospital for “revivification”; (5) “reanimated,” “defrostee” Tichy enters into the Utopia of Plenty (pp. 65–108); (6) this, he discovers, is “really” an Anti-Utopia of Scarcity (pp. 113–48). These episodes, perhaps needless to say, are not as discrete as such a scheme represents them as being; and the line of demarcation between (5) and (6) in particular can only be approximate.

15. In this regard, it is significant that the “up ‘n’ at'em,” which poisons Tichy's vision of Utopia, smells like “bitter almonds” (p. 114)—i.e., cyanide: cp. Katar (1976—in English, The Chain of Chance).

16. On the decline of Utopia, see, for example, Robert C. Elliott's “The Fear of Utopia,” in his The Shape of Utopia (Chicago & London, 1970), pp. 84–101; on its ambiguous resurrection, see “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” (SFS, 9 [1982]: 147–58), in which Fredric Jameson refers to Roadside Picnic as his chief example.

17. See FC, pp. 93, 99, 104, 106, 137, and 143 for passages in which Tichy's sewer reappears as a kind of Return of the Repressed. The fact that “reality” -as-sewer gradually obtrudes itself as such into the anti-utopian world of 2039 serves only to involve it all the more with Tichy's cloacal fantasy and hence advances the actualytic process.

18. Of course, the basis of this calculation becomes dubitable the moment we read that the “real” date of Tichy's last two visions is not 2039, but 2098, when the human population of Earth has reached about 95 billion rather than 29.5 (see pp. 67, 147). In this way, Futurological Congress finally removes even its own “fictifacts” as a reference point for locating (its) “reality.”

19. See the comments of Lem's quoted in note 10 above.

20. By the same token, the fact that the “interferent” who assaults Tichy “look[s] half like an oak” (p. 75) indicates that the connection between Tichy's past and present hallucinatory episodes is bilateral.

21. For more on this matter, see pp. 206–13 of the essay of mine cited in note 11 above.

22. This common ground of SF and futurology is what Lem in effect maps out in “Metafuturology” (q.v.).

23. Lem himself encourages us to doubt that he conceived of Futurological Congress in neologistic terms ab origine. In his interview with Csicsery-Ronay, he generalizes: “Neologisms happen to come up only when they become absolutely indispensable to me during the course of writing” (p. 247 of this issue; my emphasis). On the other hand, it is not absolutely clear that that remark applies specifically to Futurological Congress. Nor does my interpretation hinge on its not doing so: it is sufficient for my purposes that Lem in effect works (in his own words, from the same interview: p. 247) “not only but largely in neologisms.”

    It is also worth mentioning that the neologistic theory of SF inextricably involved in Futurological Congress's (manner of) meaning complements the critical ideas about SF's linguistic basis that others have arrived at independent of Lem—Kathleen L. Spencer, for example, through the influence of Samuel R. Delany: see her “‘The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low’: Towards a Stylistic Description of Science Fiction,” SFS, 10 (1983):35–48.

24. Such a qualification is implicit throughout Lem's critical writings on SF, as it is in the opening sentence of his “Metafuturology.”

25. That Ubik is unquestionably the book of Dick's which Lem values most highly can be inferred from his devoting to it the better part of his essay “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans” (for which, see SFS, 2 [1975]:54–67). Evidently, too, Ubik must have been very fresh in Lem's mind when he was writing Futurological Congress—given, approximately, the mere two-year interval between the dates of publication of their respective fictions.

    For more on Dick's epistemology of paranoia, especially as he works it out in Ubik, see Carl Freedman's “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” SFS, 11 (1984):15–23.

26. The difference that I am getting at between Lem and Dick is perhaps clearly inferrable from the argument of Lem's essay “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction”: “Literary games can never have so great a degree of semantic vacuum [as games in the strict sense of the word], for they are played with ‘natural language,’ which always has meanings oriented toward the world of real objects” (SFS, 1 [1973]: 26–27). This statement hints at a counter-current in Lem's SF: as his fictions “actualytically” subvert our conceptions of “reality,” they at the same time create an alien world suggestive of what extra-human reality may be like; and this they do by means of the very neologistic processes which make them—and with them, their human self-discoveries—possible.