Microworlds Page 22
Only then do we notice the mechanism of their creative process. It is always dangerous, even fatal for the creator, when we see the invariant (debunking) structure, the algorithm of his creative power. God is a total mystery to us above all because it is on principle impossible for us — and will remain impossible for us — to understand or imitate exactly the structure of God’s act of creation.
Considered from a formal point of view, the creative method of Borges is very simple. It might be called unitas oppositorum, the unity of mutually exclusive opposites. What allegedly must be kept separate for all time (that which is considered irreconcilable) is joined before our very eyes, and without distorting logic. The structural content of nearly all of Borges’s stories is built up by this elegant and precise unity. Borges calls the one and the same the conflicting notions of the orthodox and the heretic, Judas and Jesus. Christ, betrayer and betrayed, the troglodytes and the immortals, chaos and order, the individual and the cosmos, the nobleman and the monster, good and evil, the unique and the repeated, etc. His literary game with its borderline meanings always begins where opposites repel one another with their inherent force; and it ends as soon as they are joined together. But we can see a trivial weakness in Borges’s work in the fact that there is always the same mechanism of conversion (or a closely related inversion). God the Almighty was wise enough never to repeat Himself in such a manner. We authors, his successors, shadows and apprentices, also mustn’t do it. Occasionally — but very rarely — the skeletal, paradigmatic structure of the transformations used in Borges’s fiction results in truly extraordinary things, as I have tried to show. But we always find this structure, invariably in the same form, once we have properly recognized and assessed it. Such repetition, which inevitably is already accompanied by an element of the unintentionally comical, is the most familiar and most general weakness in all of Borges’s fiction. For as good old Le Bon has already said in his work on humor, we always look disdainfully down upon the mechanic, for a mechanical process always lets the strange and surprising get away. It is simple to predict the future of a purely mechanical phenomenon. In its utmost depths, the structural topology of Borges’s work acknowledges its relationship with all mechanistic-determinist kinds of literature, including the mystery novel. The mystery novel always incorporates unequivocally the formula of Laplacean determinism.
The cause of his work’s “mechanistic” sickness is this, I think: from the beginning of his literary career, Borges has suffered from a lack of a free and rich imagination.[16] In the beginning he was a librarian, and he has remained one, although the most brilliant manifestation of one. He had to search in libraries for sources of inspiration, and he restricted himself wholly to cultural-mythical sources. They were deep, multifarious, rich sources — for they contain the total reservoir of the mythical thought of mankind.
But in our age they are on the decline, dying off as far as their power to interpret and explain a world undergoing further changes is concerned. In his paradigmatic structures, and even in his greatest achievements, Borges is located near the end of a descending curve which had its culmination centuries ago. Therefore he is forced to play with the sacral, the awe-inspiring, the sublime and the mysterious from our grandfathers. Only in rare cases does he succeed in continuing this game in a serious way. Only then does he break through the paradigmatically and culturally caused incarceration which is its limitation, and which is quite contrary to the freedom of artistic creation he strives for. He is one of the great men, but at the same time he is an epigone. Perhaps for the last time. He has lit up — given a paradoxical resurrection to — the treasures transmitted to us from the past. But he will not succeed in keeping them alive for any long period of time. Not because he has a second-rate mind, but because, I believe, such a resurrection of transitory things is in our time quite impossible. His work, admirable though it may be, is located in its entirety at an opposite pole from the direction of our fate. Even this great master of the logically immaculate paradox cannot “alloy” our world’s fate with his own work. He has explicated to us paradises and hells that remain forever closed to man. For we are building newer, richer, and more terrible paradises and hells; but in his books Borges knows nothing about them.
Translated from the German by Franz Rottensteiner
ABOUT THE STRUGASTSKY’S ROADSIDE PICNIC
There are subjects that cannot be entirely exhausted. For theologians, such a subject is God. How can one definitively report on something that is, by definition, inexhaustible; how, when the description presumes a limit, can one describe a Being which, in principle, consists of infinite qualities? In this case, various strategies have been used: a multiplication of general concepts — which, however, generates no precise picture; comparisons — but they necessarily reduce the divine attributes to the level of all-too-concrete categories; or a spiraling approach to the subject whereby a definitive determination is replaced by an approximation — which for that reason is likewise inadequate.[17]
The optimal strategy for theology has proved to be that of maintaining the mysteriousness of God. Yet rigorously to preserve that mystery, one would actually have to remain silent; and a silent theology ceases to be theology. The strategy therefore turned (in later — e.g., Christian — versions) into one operating on obvious contradictions. God the omniscient knew that from man as He had made him would come the Fall. Yet God created him free. If God was aware in advance that man would inevitably fall, then man was not free — which nevertheless is exactly what the theologian asserted he was. In this way dogmatically imposed contradictions create the very mystery before which reason must become silent.
An inexhaustible topic of fantastic literature is the reasonable, yet not human, being. How can a human author describe a being which is definitely gifted with reason, but which, with equally categorical certainty, is not human? The bare assertion of its reasonableness will not do, since the genre must work with facts. Here, too, fantasts have resorted to various strategies. The one that proved the best in theology — namely, preserving the mystery — cannot be applied in exactly the same way: aliens, after all, are not deities but material beings like us. The author who describes them with the aid of various readily apparent contradictions is thus requiring the reader to believe in something absurd; whereas it is not, after all, in the writer’s power to establish no-matterwhat dogmas.
According to the simplest available strategy, then, intelligent beings differ from each other corporeally, and only from this area do their peculiarities arise. Mentally they are identical or similar to human beings, since there can be only one form of Reason. H.
G. Wells gave reality to this view almost a hundred years ago in The War of the Worlds. His Martians have a horrifying appearance, which, however, will some day be man’s.
Their bodies have deteriorated to such an extent that their heads are almost all that remains; and, according to Wells’s surmise, in the man of the future as well, the organism’s viscera will atrophy and the cranium expand. The novel says nothing about Martian culture, as if that, too, had wasted away and consisted of nothing but technical mastery and the equation of might with the cosmic justification of the state. In Wells the future thus simplifies both physiology and culture. His Martians have no interest in anything human except human blood: like vampires, they nourish themselves on it. The Martians’ technological achievements do, to be sure, arouse our admiration, but the poverty of their culture represents the fiction’s greatest weakness. Let us not speak of the loathing the aliens inspire — that can always be referred back to their physical environment. Still, is the behavior of the Martians not an unintentional caricature of an extreme rationalism?
The invasion of Wells’s Martians is certainly justified by their situation as inhabitants of a dying planet that is turning into a desert, from which perspective the fruitful earth hovers as territory (Lebensraum) to be conquered. What proves to be an exceptional case within the solar system was nonetheless thoughtl
essly appropriated as the model for the whole science-fiction genre. Indeed, the successors to Wells mechanically imitated the failings of the master. The science fiction that followed his sickened on the chronic monstrosity of stellar invaders, while leaving behind the rationale by which Wells accounts for it. Furthermore, later writers, wanting at all costs to surpass the founder of the genre in their rendering of aliens’ hideousness, went well beyond the limits of plausibility. By equipping their aliens with ever greater power, they filled the entire universe with civilizations whose desire to expand is wholly irrational. The greater the power attributed to the aliens, the more irrational is their invasion of earth. In this phase, science fiction became a fantasy of imposture and of paranoid delusions, because it claimed that the cosmic powers were sharpening their fangs the better to eat humanity, as if earth and its treasures were of incalculable value not only for the inhabitants of a small desert planet like Mars, but also for every imaginable civilization in the galaxy. Yet the preconception that a power with armies of starships at its disposal could be dead set on taking over our property is as naïve as the assumption that one of the superpowers of earth would mobilize its armies in order to expropriate a grocery store. The price of the invasion must always be higher than the value of the loot.
Thus invasion plots could not be motivated by interest in material gain. Instead, the aliens attack earth because it pleases them to do so; they destroy because they want to destroy; they enslave humanity because it amuses them to exercise tyrannical mastery. In this way, science fiction exchanged Wellsian interplanetary Darwinism for a sadism which became a cosmic constant in intercivilizational contacts. Science fiction’s task of forming hypotheses was replaced by that of projection, in the sense the word has in depth psychology: the authors projected their fears and self-generated delusions onto the universe. They thereby established a paranoid cosmos, in which everything having so much as a hint of life sets about the conquest of earth — a cosmos that is a trap set to catch humankind, a cosmos whose evolution comes down to an embodiment of the principle of “Civilization as a wolf to Civilization” (cp. homo lupus homini).
This “den of thieves” cosmos was later transfigured many times over. Its general unfriendliness was mechanically transformed into friendliness. The aliens attack, but only to rob us of our free will and to preserve humankind by taking us into protective custody (this motif became especially popular during the Cold War years); or they don’t attack immediately, but hesitate and thus enable humankind to unite: in view of the stellar threat, solidarity wins.
Further permutations of the invasion scenario resulted from these; yet none of the variations invented stands up to a thoughtful examination. They are incapable of answering certain elementary questions that Wells’s novel — albeit in its own way — does pertinently address itself to. There is, for one, the question of what the motive is for the star-voyage — something that cannot be explained in terms of “they felt like it” or of a game of cops and robbers; for another, there is the question of the main orientation of cultures on a high level of material development; for yet another, there is the question of what form systems that have achieved a high level of astrotechnical accomplishment will assume; and so forth. But the most telling of such questions is this: why do actual human cultures show a tremendous richness approaching the truly diverse, while virtually all cosmic cultures in science fiction are marked by a depressing uniformity which borders on monotony?
To such questions science fiction could make no answer as long as it exchanged reflection on the fate of reason in the cosmos for sensational stereotypes of interplanetary adventure. In this way, science fiction’s line of development — and this concerns the subject under discussion — became antithetical to that of science. At a time when scientists, beginning to discuss seriously the problem of how one might communicate with other civilizations in the universe, were formulating the hypotheses that Reason takes various forms and that not all possible manifestations of intellect need assume the human form, fantasy was already at the opposite pole from such thinking, driving the last remnants of realistic concepts out of its sphere through its undisguised borrowing from fairy tales. In its desire to furnish the aliens with ever greater power, it already ascribed protean abilities to them: such a being can, just by wishing it, transform itself into a tree, into part of a rocket, even into a human being. It can also take over a human body and control the human mind, thus in effect giving new life to a subject of old myths: possession by evil spirits. This fantasy destroyed intercultural barriers in short order, by ascribing some sort of telepathic omnipotence to the aliens; or, on the other hand, it formed the cosmic relationships between the planets on primitive, simplistic models of earthly origin (those, for example, suggested by colonialism, by the exploits of the conquistadors, or by the rules governing the creation of imperialistic coalitions). In so doing, it disregarded all possible objections both of a sociological and of a physical nature — objections that are contingent on the tremendous spatio-temporal distances in the cosmos. That handicap it did away with once and for all, by conferring on the star-voyagers the ability to move at any desired speed. In short, while in Wells’s modest effort the Martians — in accordance with the scientific data of his time — were at home in the real cosmos, science fiction now chose to locate its beings in a totally (i.e., astronomically, physically, sociologically, and — finally — psychologically) falsified cosmos. It practiced a ruthless exploitation, ransacking, in its search for inspiration, history textbooks and the Linnean system alike, in order to provide lizards, cuttlefish with grasping arms, crabs, insects, and so forth with intelligence. When even that had become threadbare and presently boring, the theme science fiction had run into the ground was in its teratological extremism taken over by the third-rate horror movie, which is perfectly bare of any thoughtful content.
American writers deny the validity of such a diagnosis of the facts, and they find allies in the book buyers, who have become used to an easily digestible, sensationalistic literature that pretends to be science fantasy. Yet the fairytale nature of this “fantasy” is obvious. Nobody questions why the dragons in fairy tales are so mischievously bloodthirsty or why the witches in them prefer to devour children rather than chickens. These are simple axioms of the fairy tales, whose world is fundamentally partisan: evil appears in it so that it can be defeated by good. It is therefore clear that such evil must be powerful; otherwise, the final victory of good would seem too easily gained. The world of science fiction, on the contrary, must be impartial; it must not incubate evil merely for the sake of allowing the united interplanetary forces of virtue to overcome it. Nor should it be a partisan world with a minus sign, an anti-fairy-tale world in which the beautiful, amiable, and morally upright good is bred in order to give the greatest possible pleasure to an evil incarnate which proceeds to gobble it up with relish. (Such a world, incidentally, was imagined by the Marquis de Sade, whom one could hardly take for an author of science fantasy.) The science-fiction world must be (to put it quite plainly) a real world: that is, one in which no one is privileged from the start, in which no fate is predetermined, whether in favor of good or of evil. Since men are not angels, there is no need to ascribe angelic traits to the aliens; since men, though they kill flies, do not exactly travel to the ends of the earth to do so, similarly the aliens, even if they should regard us as flies, should not go out of their way to seek earthlings to swat.
An author who describes a life form or type of intelligence different from the terrestrial variety is in an easier position than the one who depicts a cosmic invasion of earth. The former can — as, for example, I did in Solaris — restrict himself or herself to portraying phenomena that differ as much as desired from what humans are familiar with. The latter, proceeding from the “interventionist” premise, assumes that the aliens have come to earth and that, consequently, something or other must have dictated their literally astronomical undertaking. What could their motive have been?
If it was not an impulse to fight or to steal, it must have been the urge either to learn or to play (they came in order to amuse themselves a bit with us…). There are, as we see, not many alternate possibilities. Thus the best strategy for dealing with this subject, too, is to preserve forever the aliens’ mysteriousness.
I would like to stress emphatically that this strategy is not founded, either entirely or primarily, on aesthetic criteria; that, in other words, the narrative must not preserve the aliens’ mysteriousness in order continuously to puzzle readers and hold them spellbound by the great unknown. The strategy does, of course, incline to conform to the fundamental directives of conflict theory. Thus, by way of example, future-strategists at military academies are required to impute to the enemy the most threatening intentions from the point of view of the strategists’ own side. In regard to cosmic aliens, such a dictate has a cognitive, rather than a military, purport. Yet visitors fitted with absolutely inimical intentions do not represent the worst of all possible eventualities. In this case, the enemy’s attitude is at least clearly defined. The situation is worse when we absolutely cannot understand the peculiarities of their strange behavior, when we cannot explain their alien proceedings.