Very interesting to see how differently we reacted to that book! Even though I recognize a similar meaning in the book as you did, to me it had me frequently laughing and ended up causing in me a feeling similar to the "cosmic joke", which rather than hopeless is infinitely hopeful. It's actually one of the funniest books I've read. So seeing that it affected you in the opposite way is surprising, and further makes me think that it's an excellent book, as good literature doesn't force a message on you, but lets you project part of your own beliefs, hopes, and fears in it. Similar to a psychedelic, in a way.View attachment 111917
As promised to @blig-blug, I read Stanisław Lem's "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", and once again I find myself confounded by Lem's work.
Spoilers ahead!
The plot's convolution is the heart of the book's philosophical mechanism, and through it, Lem constructs a world where signal and noise are mathematically indistinguishable, trapping both the protagonist and the reader in an infinite hermeneutic loop. In the "Building" everything is assumed to be a coded message, a provocation, or a loyalty test. Governed by an administrative horror vacui, accidents and random events do not exist as a concept, and are instead interpreted as masterstrokes of counter-intelligence and subterfuge.
Throughout the book it is made apparent that any action can mean its exact opposite, with two prominent examples being loyalty expressed through apparent treason, or treason cloaked in hyper-loyalty. By virtue of this mechanism of converting random entropy to deliberate encryption, Lem masterfully guides the reader into a pervasive sense that objective truth simply does not exist anymore. That a difference between signal and noise is not only undiscoverable, but that a difference does not exist in the first place, and furthermore - that even if it did exist, it would not matter at all.
For all the reader knows (and is told), the outer world might not exist at all; reality is sustained strictly intra muros, where the Building maintains its operation by feeding itself on manufactured and simulated subversion and treason, all wrapped in "missions" that need to be "solved" by the people that inhabit the sterile corridors and endless rooms of this cursed entity.
The protagonist also has a "mission" assigned to him, yet he doesn't know what the requirements are; it functions as a pure qualitas occulta, invoked to explain the unexplainable without possessing any mechanical substance. The instructions first appear to be modified on the go, then are lost in a sequence of freak accidents, leading the increasingly desperate main character to wander around in search of an illusive truth - an endeavor that ultimately never bears fruit. Through this, Lem not only establishes the rigid sense of hopelessness that will accompany the reader throughout the entire journey, but also hints at the notion that the human mind is not built to tolerate pure contingency.
The need for a "grand architect" that humans have exhibited for millenia can be depicted by virtue of taking classical theology as an example, wherein suffering and chaos are rationalized through divine will. In the Building, this impulse is transplanted onto bureaucracy. The protagonist prefers to believe that an all-powerful, omniscient "Command" is testing him through deliberate cruelty rather than face the terrifying alternative: that nobody is in charge, there is no plan, and the system runs on mindless momentum.
Paranoia has become liturgy - an endless pilgrimage ad altarem mente captorum - and to doubt the existence of the Mission at all is equivalent to heresy.
To properly convey the sense of inaccessible yet all-powerful authority, Lem reframes the problem through an algorithmic lens. The Pentagon-like underground redoubt was built to protect against a military adversary, but it evolved into an autonomous organism whose sole operational imperative is self-preservation. One of its defining characteristics is anti-individualism, betrayed by the fact that the protagonist doesn't even have a name. This is not to impart some sense of mystique, but to emphasize that humans are irrelevant in this loop - the institution assigns roles, scripts, and betrayals purely to maintain state cycles.
Within the Building's logic, living requires accepting an assigned role in an endless theater of mutual espionage and profoundly pervasive paranoia. Refusing to decode the indecipherable is the only way to break the loop, and that refusal can only take one form within the oppressive confines of this soulless institution - suicide. Whether that was also in the script or not is beyond the point, because suicide is the only way anyone can wrestle control away from the bureaucratic monster, even if for but a fleeting moment before darkness descends forever.
It is hard for me to "rate" this book because it was for sure one of the most difficult reads I've had lately. It is infuriating in a flavor similar to Orwell's "1984" but in a different way. A helpless, powerless fury that overtook me in both books, but at least in 1984 I had, even if for a very short moment, some glimmer of hope that the oppressive regime can fall. In this book, the sense of hopelessness only tightened its grip the more I read, and by the end it was suffocating and heavy. So much so, in fact, that I found the ending liberating, and that says a lot.
I recognize Lem's brilliance in this work, but I doubt I have it in me to revisit it, regardless of how much time passes. More than that, I hope it never serves as a prophetic signum temporis for the future of our species - though such an outcome remains uncomfortably plausible. Thank you for the recommendation @blig-blug. You have good taste in literature.
Read on
Thank you for your excellent review! This was very, very interesting for me to read. I'll be re-reading that book soon.
