[In the following review, Baranczak discusses the critical reception of Highcastle: A Remembrance upon its original 1966 publication, and the problems with reading Lem's factual memoir in light of his previous works of imaginative fiction.]

A renowned science fiction writer who all of a sudden publishes a book subtitled A Remembrance is like your local Delphic oracle announcing its conversion into a branch of the Genealogical Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. You hate it when such a thing happens. There's nothing wrong in searching for one's roots, but you somehow don't expect it from people who specialize in prophecy. Imagination, not memory, is supposed to be their field. If they are so good at foreseeing all the troubles that the universe has in store, why are they wasting their valuable time delving into things infinitely less momentous on account of their being, first, personal, and second, gone?

One of the many charms of Stanislaw Lem's Highcastle: A Remembrance is that it is simultaneously an engaging little memoir and an engaging little treatise on the impossibility of writing memoirs; but it is hard for the reader to get over the fact that this is the last book we would have expected from this writer. The muted tone of surprise could have already been detected in the critical voices welcoming, half-heartedly, the original Polish edition in 1966. It had something slightly upsetting about it even then and there. I suspect that it will retain this quality in the eyes of its American readers thirty years later.

Here, after all, is a memoir of a famous person that does not portray the famous person's father as a molester of children. In America, this is a major flaw indeed. It may be annoying when an old-fashioned “remembrance” of a writer's childhood comes along in which the writer's father is a goodhearted, mild-mannered, somewhat absentminded paterfamilias, whose only exercise in stern parental authority is the confiscation of the pistol that his teenage son obtained from a schoolmate and put to use in the family's apartment in order to check the weapon's penetrating force against the living-room door. That hardly qualifies as child abuse.

In Poland, in 1966, the slightly upsetting effect of Highcastle was of a different nature. Lem was already an established writer, with fifteen books published over as many years. He had a large and enthusiastic audience in Poland, and, thanks to numerous translations, a growing international reputation. Yet “established” somehow never captured the nature of this tireless experimenter's position in literary life. As we look back at the fifteen books published prior to Highcastle, one impression is still as striking now as it was then: philosophical consistency diversified by thematic, generic and stylistic variety.

It looked as if Lem was becoming more and more entrenched in his vision of the human (and the humanoid) condition even as he was growing more and more playfully experimental. There was The Astronauts, his orthodox novelistic debut of 1951, which, were it not that its action took place aboard a spacecraft rather than in a coalmine, a collective farm or a locomotive factory, would not differ very much from the classic Socialist-Realist “novel of production”—and there was his wildly subversive or, in the political lingo of its time, “revisionist” Dialogues, published just six years later. There was the relatively straightfaced science fiction of Eden (1959) and, for all its ironic complexities, Solaris (1961)—and there was the farcical, no-holds-barred hilarity of The Star Diaries (1957). There was The Cyberiad (1965), with its references to the models of the fable, the fairy tale, or the mock-heroic epic—and there was Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), which owed much to Kafka's or Orwell's dystopias. And there was even a realistic contemporary novel in three volumes, The Time Not Lost (1955), and a metaphysical whodunit, The Investigation (1959), and a collection of erudite and profound essays, Summa Technologiae (1964).

It might seem as if Lem's versatility had prepared his readers for any surprise. In real life, however, a writer's public image is never a fair impression of all of his or her books. Not unlike the stars of Hollywood, immutably cast in their generic roles of the Voluptuous Blonde or the Strong Silent Type, the makers of literature may also find themselves forced to trade their individual complexity and their painstaking evolution for a simplified and unchangeable trademark, so that they may be noticed and recognized at all. And the best of them spend a good part of their lives trying futilely to discard the trademark and to complicate the picture.

There may be no better example of this than the history of the reception of the work of Stanislaw Lem. I wonder what feats are still necessary for this author finally to shake off his trademark as a “science fiction writer.” In this regard, he is a twentieth-century version of Chekhov, trying all his life to make his readers forget the erstwhile existence of the cheap humorist Antosha Chekhonte. Having became famous as the only European science fiction writer worth reading, Lem keeps trying to make us see that he is worth reading, all right, but also for reasons that have precious little to do with space-ships, robots and extraterrestrials. Is it not enough that over the past thirty years he has published, if my reckoning is correct, more non-science fiction, mock-science fiction or anti-science fiction than science fiction? That he has written a couple of bulky theoretical or critical books (Philosophy of Chance, 1968; Fantasy and Futurology, 1970) devoted to debunking the myth of science fiction's cognitive value? That he has proven on countless occasions to be a writer who explores the fundamental unchangeability of human nature rather than heralding the arrival of a technology-boosted New Man or New Civilization? All this has not been enough, apparently. And so apart from its other merits—it is a highly interesting reflection on childhood and memory as well as a very funny book—Highcastle can also be read as an early expression of Lem's attempt to wriggle out of the limitations imposed on him by the demons of classification.

But the picture is even more complicated. Science fiction had a particular significance in Lem's historical setting. There were many readers who tended to view his whole business of science fiction as a literary subterfuge. And so, by 1966, he had earned wide recognition not just as the leading writer of science fiction but also as the leading writer (or second perhaps only to Slawomir Mrozek) of political satire. After more than twenty years of People's Poland, the eye of Lem's average Polish reader was well trained in reading between the lines. Lem's The Star Diaries, to cite but one delightful example, was eagerly read and understood as what it was: an exercise in anti-totalitarian dystopia, differing from Animal Farm only in that its protagonist was a spacecraft pilot and the action took place on distant planets. And he beat Orwell hands down in hilarity.

The widespread adoption of this view of Lem was the chief reason why Highcastle left behind a feeling of thwarted expectation. From its very first pages, the book leaves little doubt that, at least in its plot and its setting, it has nothing in common with science fiction. But neither did Highcastle have anything in common with between-the-lines anti-regime mockery. It was, obviously enough, not another Solaris; but it was not another story from The Star Diaries either.

There were some clues, false clues, that suggested the possibility of a politically subversive, Aesopian reading. The most appealing suggestion of this sort, for many readers, was to read Highcastle as a realistic book on the Polish city of Lwów. By the mid- '60s, Polish fiction was increasingly preoccupied with the Eastern Territories lost by Poland to the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War. Despite censorship, the books on this theme managed to achieve remarkable popularity; novels set in the formerly Polish cities of Lwów/Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg and Wilno/Vilnius/Vilna could always count on a large following. And some of them were pretty good novels, too.

Nostalgia for the lost paradise of one's childhood has been one of the major forces behind the literary imagination of all times and places, but it gives your creativity a double jolt in situations where your expulsion from the Garden is not only symbolic but also quite literal; when your return to Paradise is rendered impossible not just by the God-decreed irreversibility of time but also by the man-decreed untraversability of a state frontier. Barred from re-entering the city of their youth even as tourists, the former inhabitants of Lwów might have devoured Highcastle for its evocative, nostalgia-nutrient value. For readers like them, this book was, first and foremost, the memoir (one which saw the light of day most probably thanks to the censor's oversight) of a fellow exile who used to walk down the same streets, smell the same coffee from the same cafés, laugh at the jokes of the same radio comedians, and purchase his beloved halvah at the same streetstand.

Since it so happened that this particular memoirist was blessed with exceptional descriptive skills, Lem's fellow ex-Lembergians formed certainly the least disappointed part of Highcastle's readership. Even they, though, must have experienced some growing doubts as they turned the pages. Was it really, as the subtitle suggested, a “remembrance,” a work, then, done by Memory rather than Imagination? Was it a legitimate “book on Polish Lwów”? Did the book's title refer to the actual High Castle, a monument of architecture towering over the city, or was “Highcastle” supposed to stand for something else, in its capacity as a metaphor or, God forbid, a symbol, as in Kafka's The Castle?

Misleadingly enough, Lem's narrative begins very much like a traditional autobiography. All the circumstances of his life as a child and a teenager in Lwów seem, to someone who bothers to verify them against the entry lem, stanislaw (1921–) in some literary Who's Who, to correspond closely to reality. He was born in Lwów, into the family of a fairly prosperous laryngologist, his parents did live where he tells us they did, he did attend the schools that he describes. The initial impression of non-fictional authenticity will greatly decrease in further chapters; but for a while, at least, Lem's way of sticking to actual events, authentic places and specific material objects is refreshing. (As befits a good novelist, he is a proven master of synecdoche, perfectly able to draw an indirect yet lively portrayal of his father by describing a few of his possessions—his laryngologist's mirror, his book cabinet, his private collection of the most bizarre foreign bodies found in his patients’ throats.)

Even more refreshing is the unassuming, self-ironic honesty that never permits Lem to stoop to doing what memoirs of childhood mostly do nowadays: complaining of how unbearable the writer's early life was and blaming anybody but himself for that. Quite the contrary. He freely admits his lack of any feeling of guilt for having had a generally happy childhood. And he writes: “Norbert Wiener begins his autobiography with the words: ‘I was a child prodigy.’ What I would have to say is ‘I was a monster.’” The aforementioned episode with the pistol was just one among many spectacular misdeeds committed by him during his early period of relentless destruction:

It is striking that I have little memory of playmates yet had so much feeling for various objects. … Could this have been because objects submitted to me completely, whereas living beings had a will of their own, a will that went too much against mine? Because everything that surrounded me, whether of metal or wood, became my plunder, my prey. I waited a long time, years, for the death of our gramophone, or at least for it to grow old, but finally my patience ran out and I opened it up. … [O]nly the objects were honest with me, were completely open, hiding nothing: those that were at my mercy I destroyed, as well as those that I had no power over.

For Lem the schoolboy, however, wreaking such havoc is by no means tantamount to admitting chaos into his life. The opposite was the case. He appears to have been born a rationalist, believing in some underlying order in all things and leaning always on the instinctively adopted Leibnizian principle (not that he had read philosophy yet) that all things real are rational. Accordingly, he destroys his toys not just for the primitive pleasure of destruction but also to see how they are built and what makes them work—to discover their hidden Reason. He soon outgrows rationalism and enters his second phase, by jumping to the opposite philosophical extreme: instead of reason and order, he is now fascinated by irrational chance; instead of taking apart everything that has the misfortune to fall into his hands, he now prefers to build things on his own. Like the things that he destroyed, the things that he created do not work or, if they do work, they do not serve any practical purpose.

And finally the third phase of the restless child's spiritual development, the phase begun during his high school years, is marked by yet another sudden shift in his obsessions. Rather than destroying things to get to the order that governs their existence, and rather than lending his hand to the workings of chance by creating objects with no practical use, he now attempts to impose his own order upon chance. A half-fantastic chapter, written in a rich and hyperbolic style slightly reminiscent of Bruno Schulz, describes the concrete shape that this idea took on. It was the secret production—during high school classes and making use of all sorts of available material (“small sheets of paper from a notebook, … bristol, drawing paper, … high-quality cardboard cut from the covers of class exercise books, … ink, India ink, colored pencils, and coins pressed as stamps in the appropriate places”)—of identity papers.

What kind of identity papers were these? All kinds—conferring authority over a certain territory, with limitations, and documents of empowerment, and titles, and licenses and warrants, and on the longer pages I hand-printed various checks and payable-to-bearer certificates for kilograms of ore, usually platinum and gold, and vouchers for precious gems. I made passports for emperors and monarchs, assigned to them dignitaries, chancellors, each of whom could produce papers at a moment's notice, and I fashioned meticulous coats of arms and produced special passes with validations and authorizations, and since I had plenty of time, this legitimizing seemed to have no end. …

I was building a kingdom of universal permission, universal power, but … [f]ollowing my bureaucratic instincts, I rightly mistrusted transcendent ideas, sticking to the system of centimeters-grams-seconds, that is, I always specified in respectable units of measurement what the bearer could do.

As we read Lem's book with an eye on the changing proportion between the true and the fictitious, the straightforwardly autobiographical and the metaphorically imaginative, these passages clearly represent the latter. Lem eventually returns to a more subdued and businesslike memoiristic narrative, to focus again on real-life events of the last years before the outbreak of the war, but it is too late: it is already evident that what we have been reading cannot be contained within the “remembrance,” or memoir, or autobiography. Highcastle is, rather, a practical test of the cognitive powers of a writer, and of the limitations of the literary imagination, that mysterious power which enables him to “build a kingdom of universal permission” and at the same time to keep all the “bearers” of his permits and passes under strictest control, always specifying “in respectable units of measurement” what they are empowered to do.

We have every reason to believe that Lem undertook this narrative recreation of his personal past—trying “to entrust the task to my memory, giving it free rein and following it obediently”—for no other reason than to tell us what his childhood looked like. He succeeded in that, too; but on his way he happened to discover the essentially imaginative nature of memory. One more thwarted expectation: just as we reconciled ourselves to the fact that a leading expert in imagination has put his reputation at stake by trying to explore the realm of memory, it turns out that he was really at work annexing memory to imagination.