The value of postmodernist literature: Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, by Stanislaw Lem

 No, I am not a postmodernist.  One may glean that with relative ease.  Moreover, I think that the school of thought has done real damage to our political dialog.  Yet, as I often encourage you, oh nonexistent reader (how's that for postmodern?), it is important to read things from different perspectives.  Sometimes it is even enjoyable and enlightening.  This is particularly the case with Stanislaw Lem, about whom I have written before, and I'll write about him again today because it is often useful to revisit his classic works in science fiction.

Some concepts and definitions.  To the degree that we can define.  There-- more postmodernism.

Anyway, broadly speaking (writing?), postmodernism is a school of thought that questions the idea that truth is objectively knowable.  There's a lot more to it, but that is the important aspect, for our purposes today.  It is spittin' distance from solipsism, which is the most utterly useless school of philosophy that has ever been devised.  And if a solipsist is close enough to spit on you, then you got too close to a solipsist.  Run.  Run away, run far, run fast, just run.

OK, so as a statistician, I don't ascribe probabilities of 1 to anything.  We are uncertain about everything.  I'll joke about probabilities of 1, with dramatic hyperbole, but science is about uncertainty.  Where postmodernists go wrong is in conflating degrees of uncertainty with unknowability.  In science, we rely on Occam's razor.  The simplest explanation is the best explanation.  If you tell me that all of my perceptions may be wrong, or some other postmodernist shit, well... the probability isn't zero, but it's not the simplest explanation.  But I'm gonna come back to that razor.  That razor is why we, scientists, disregard postmodernist bullshit.  Because it is functionally useless.

Except in the writing of a good book!

The last time I wrote a post about Stanislaw Lem, it was for The Futurological Congress.  Oh, that's such a classic.  Today, let's revisit Memoirs Found In A Bathtub.  Weird title, very weird book.  It's Lem.  So here's the premise.  Sometime far in the future, all paper gets wiped out.  The book starts with some musings on that, looking "back" at what happened, to the degree that it is known (postmodernism alert!), then describes a "memoir" found in a secret Pentagon bunker underneath a mountain in "Ammer-Ka."  What is described in the "memoir?"  Basically, a guy shows up, trying to figure out what his job is.  He is supposed to get a "Mission."  Nobody will tell him what it is, and he bounces around between offices, where everyone is crazy, paranoid, nobody will give him any information, and he just wants to know what his fucking job is.  It is an absolutely hilarious reversal of The Prisoner, where Number 6 quits his job as a spy, gets captured, and "they" (whoever they are) try to find out why.  Instead, the narrator gets hired as a spy, sort of, and nobody will tell him why.  There's even a Number 6, and an occurrence of the famous line, "be seeing you," in the Kandel translation from Polish.

Eventually, he gets sent to a hospital for some sort of treatment when he flips out.  A group of people-- professors, no less!-- play-act some sort of weird mind game with each other that makes zero sense, but which somehow results in the narrator being charged with treason because he was a witness to, like, something.

In the end, the narrator has an opportunity to escape "the Building," but doesn't because he promised to go back and meet another denizen again.  That denizen had described to him the sequence of events that had occurred to him, as though this is merely some play, being repeated for unspecified purposes.  It happened to the older operative, and it is happening to the narrator, for reasons unknown.  The narrator goes back, and finds the other denizen in a bathroom, having committed suicide in a bathtub, with a razor.  The narrator flips out, and struggles for the razor, because he really, really wants the razor.

What happens in the book?  The plot is... well, trying to describe the plot would defeat the purpose.  It is farcical.  Kafka played for laughs.  The Prisoner inverted, with plenty of musings on the nature of truth and its unknowability as the narrator just wants to know his fucking job, and nobody will tell him.

OK.  So I hate postmodernism.  I think it is stupid and pointless.  But this kind of thing... well, it's hilarious.  Lem, as translated by Kandel (I don't speak Polish)... genius.  And it is worth taking a moment to understand who Stanislaw Lem was.  He wasn't just some random dude.  He was writing from the perspective of communist Poland.  That means it wasn't just a totalitarian government, but a totalitarian government in which information was strictly controlled by a propaganda machine, and Lem's own writing had to be managed carefully when it touched on anything that could relate to East/West conflict, or Polish politics.  Science fiction has always worked as literature because it is metaphor, and in that way, authors can sometimes do the court jester thing.  Only the court jester can speak the truth, right?  Lem could get away with a lot, but still not everything.  So if you read through Lem's work, you can see, to some degree, where he was constrained by the need to write for the communist censors.  That doesn't mean he was a secret capitalist.  He wasn't.  Rand up and left the Soviet Union and wrote libertarian screeds, which was not what Lem did, but given his circumstances he was constrained, and he was aware of his constraints.  He was aware of the constraints faced by anyone writing behind the Iron Curtain.  That was a lot of people.

And given those constraints, authors like Lem came to understand the problem in terms of postmodernism.  They couldn't know anything objectively, not because truth was an unknowable thing, but because they lived in countries where the media were strictly controlled.  Media, plural.  Fuck that.  Medium.  State-controlled.  Let's switch to singular.  The medium.  The medium is.  Are you happy now, those of you who want me to use a variation of med- in the singular form?  This way, I can do so while following the rules of grammar.

Anyway, for those behind the Iron Curtain, truth was unknowable because the state propaganda machines wouldn't tell them the truth.  Hence, postmodernism.  The problem becomes applying the philosophy as a matter, not of context, but of epistemology more broadly.

In the fragmented media environment of the modern US, I'm reaching into that bathtub for the razor.  Not so that history can repeat itself, but because my boy, Billy Ock taught me how to shave.  We do not have state-run media.  Yeah, Fox and similar organizations will just fuckin' lie.  The biases of organizations like MSNBC are a little different.  [Cough, cough... Tony Timpa...]  At any given point in time, there are things you will believe that aren't true.  You can, however, apply a process that will converge towards objective truth.  Yeah, it takes a little effort, but boo-fucking-hoo-cry-me-a-river.  The postmodernist approach is a rejection of the idea that you should bother because you can't know objective truth.  To someone living behind the Iron Curtain, OK, sure.  That's not the case now.  You just need to put in some work, cognitively as well as in terms of the sources of information you use.  Then, you lather up, and give yourself a nice, close shave.

Yet even understanding the epistemological value of Occam's razor as a response to postmodernist blather, we can still appreciate the context in which Lem was writing, the humor, and even the occasional applications in modern American contexts.  If you want to see a dysfunctional bureaucracy at (not) work, read Memoirs Found In A Bathtub.  If you want to see constant backbiting and mutual distrust, read Memoirs Found In A Bathtub.  It is not without its insights and applications.

Just don't give me this "we can't really know anything" bullshit.

As for music, sometimes I waffle over what to post.  Today, there's really only one choice.  Little Feat, "Fat Man In The Bathtub."  Here's a live version.