A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem Read Free Book Online Page B

open up, no end of roads (the pattern of the commas in Chapter VI is an analogue of the map of Rome!), and roads not every which way, for they all, with their innumerable outbranchings, interweave harmoniously to form a single whole (which Hannahan proves employing topological algebra—see the Commentary, the Metamathematical Appendix, p. 81 Iff.). And thus everything achieves its realization.
    Only one doubt arises, and that is: has Patrick Hannahan reached the mark of his great predecessor, or has he overshot that mark, thereby calling into question not only himself—but his predecessor as well!—in the realm of Art? There are rumors to the effect that Hannahan was assisted in his creation by a battery of computers furnished him by IBM. And even if this be true, I see no offense in it; these days composers make common use of computers—why should writers be denied? Some say that books so fashioned can be read only, in turn, by other digital machines, since no man is capable of encompassing, in his mind, such an ocean of facts and their correlations. Permit me one question: does the man exist who is able thus to encompass
Finnegan’s Wake
or even
Ulysses
? I do not mean on the literal level, but all the allusions, all the associations and cultural-mythic symbolisms, all the combined paradigms and archetypes on which these works stand and grow in glory? Certainly no one could manage it alone. No one, for that matter, could wade through the entire body of criticism that the prose of James Joyce has accumulated to date! And therefore the question as to the validity of computer participation in fiction is wholly immaterial.
    Hostile reviewers say that Hannahan has produced the largest logogriph in literature, a semantic monster rebus, a truly infernal charade or crossword puzzle. They say that the cramming of those million or billion allusions into a work of belles-lettres, that the flaunting play with etymological, phraseological, and hermeneutic complications, that the piling up of layers of never-ending, perversely antinomial meanings, is not literary creativity, but the composing of brain teasers for peculiarly paranoiac hobbyists, for enthusiasts and collectors fanatically given to bibliographical digging. That this is, in a word, utter perversion, the pathology of a culture and not its healthy development.

    Excuse me, gentlemen—but where exactly is one to draw the line between the multiplicity of meaning that marks the integration of a genius, and the sort of enriching of a work with meanings that represents the pure schizophrenia of a culture? I suspect that the anti-Hannahan group of literary experts fears being put out of work. For Joyce provided brilliant charades but did not tack onto them any explanation of his own; consequently the critic who contributes commentary to
Ulysses
and
Finnegan
is able to display his intellectual biceps, his far-reaching perspicacity, or his imitative genius. Hannahan, on the other hand, did everything
himself
. Not content merely to create the work, he added reference materials, an
apparatus criticus
twice its size. In this lies the crucial difference, and not in such circumstances as, for example, the fact that Joyce “thought up everything on his own,” whereas Hannahan relied on computers hooked up to the Library of Congress (twenty-three million volumes). So, I see no way out of the trap into which we have been driven by the murderously meticulous Irishman: either
Gigamesh
is the crowning achievement of modern literature, or else neither it nor the tale of Finnegan together with the Joycean Odyssey can be granted admission to literary Olympus.

Sexplosion
Simon Merrill
(Walker & Company, New York)
    Â 
    If one is to believe the author—and more and more they tell us to believe the authors of science fiction!—the current surge of sex will become a deluge in the 1980’s. But the action of the novel
Sexplosion
begins twenty years later,