Out of The Time Machine: Generic Self-Consciousness

Most, perhaps all, of Stanislaw Lem's fictions are typically 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. 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. Rather, it primarily demands a metageneric reading; that is, it obliges us to think of it in those terms if we would discover the fiction's conceptual integrity.

In this and other respects, 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 traveler finally returns.