{"id":843,"date":"2015-11-04T19:40:27","date_gmt":"2015-11-05T01:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/?p=843"},"modified":"2015-11-04T19:40:27","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T01:40:27","slug":"a-very-confused-detective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/04\/a-very-confused-detective\/","title":{"rendered":"A Very Confused Detective"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year I read two Stanislaw Lem novels I’d never read before. The Invincible<\/em> didn’t impress me<\/a>, but The Investigation<\/em> is one of his better books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Investigation<\/em> is Lem\u2019s take on the British mystery. As you might expect the subject isn\u2019t the usual mundane murder: Lieutenant Gregory of Scotland Yard is assigned to look into reports of dead bodies found moved with no one around to move them. It seems corpses are getting up and walking.<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Generally[1]<\/a> I think Lem is at his best in his satirical books, like The Cyberiad<\/em>, The Star Diaries<\/em>, and A Perfect Vacuum<\/em>. The Investigation<\/em> isn\u2019t one of those, but it\u2019s not dry and numbingly earnest like The Invincible<\/em>. Lem\u2019s prose is good here, with sharp and memorable descriptions, as when Gregory looks at his fellow train passengers and sees “a sea of accidental faces.”<\/p>\n

The Investigation<\/em> is set in detective-novel England as seen from Poland. In the first few pages we hear of places like Engender, Planting, and Spittoon, and minor characters with names like Thicker and Samuel Filthey. Lem drops these into an entirely straight-faced conversation about animate corpses. It reads like a CSI<\/em> briefing done in Monty Python voices. Lem surrounds straight man Gregory with interestingly grotesque characters.[2]<\/a> The best is the birdlike, irascible statistician Sciss, who is incensed by the suspicion that someone might be making fun of mathematics.<\/p>\n

Where The Investigation<\/em> shines is in its surrealism. Lem writes like a dream here, literally: when he drops in a dream sequence it\u2019s not a typical allegorical novel dream, it actually has the disjointed, illogical feel of a real nightmare. Yet it\u2019s still one of those dream sequences you don’t initially realize is a dream, which says a lot about the novel\u2019s tone. Gregory is, after all, investigating walking corpses. Meetings with his superior often take place at night, or in darkened rooms, as if Scotland Yard has instituted mood lighting policies. The case culminates with the nightmarish image of a body moving like a wind-up toy, and I can\u2019t imagine a horror movie pulling off a creepier image than the one The Investigation<\/em> evoked in my imagination.<\/p>\n

The more impossible the case seems the more Gregory moves out of the ordinary world, and the more alienated he becomes. His life outside Scotland Yard is a series of small awkward failures to connect to other people, from the bartender whose simple questions about dinner he\u2019s too abstracted to understand to a humiliatingly unsuccessful attempt to give a few coins to a beggar. Gregory is ultimately so confused that he walks down a tunnel, finds another person blocking his way, and only belatedly realizes he’s walked into a mirror.<\/p>\n

Like the astronauts in The Invincible<\/em>, Gregory is dealing with an apparently intelligent phenomenon that may have no intelligence behind it at all. Sciss\u2019s best explanation for the animate corpses is essentially that some random physical phenomena happened to come together in just the right way to make the dead walk. For Gregory this calls to mind a metaphor of the universe as a bowl of soup in which bits randomly clump together to form something whole. Improbable, but as Lem wrote in another novel<\/a>, mathematically improbable events sometimes happen anyway. Lem was seemingly fascinated by randomness and probability, returning to the theme over and over. (One of the fake book reviews in A Perfect Vacuum<\/em><\/a> covers a book arguing that if the laws of probability are true then the universe itself, being so improbable, cannot possibly exist.) Lem’s characters seek order in statistical chaos. Many of his novels hinge on distinguishing between meaningful, intelligent phenomena and pareidolia: the misapplied pattern-seeking that, for instance, lets us see faces in clouds. His aliens are really<\/em> alien. Is Solaris bringing visitors\u2019 memories to life for a reason, or is it an autonomic response, like white blood cells reacting to a virus? Is it possible, without anthropomorphizing, for humans to understand what\u2019s happening on Eden<\/a>? Most of Lem\u2019s stories and themes come back to the limits of human ability to comprehend an infinite, incomprehensible universe.[3]<\/a> (In this Lem has a weird thematic parallel to H. P. Lovecraft, although happily Lem\u2019s preoccupation with incomprehensibility is based in a sense of wonder, not xenophobia.) The Investigation<\/em> takes these themes out of their science fictional context and applies them to the detective novel.<\/p>\n

How readers interpret the genre of The Investigation<\/em> will affect how they interpret Sciss\u2019s theory. Gregory can’t decide what genre he\u2019s in. Sometimes he\u2019s seduced by Sciss\u2019s ideas\u2014if the human mind can\u2019t understand everything, he reasons at one point, maybe it\u2019s irrelevant whether an explanation seems to make sense. Sometimes he\u2019s not buying it: the outbreak of walking dead must have some human intelligence behind it, and he increasingly suspects Sciss himself. But because the name on the cover is Stanislaw Lem and not Agatha Christie, the reader knows the impossible may be happening.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s what Gregory ultimately confirms. But his superintendant has a more mundane theory\u2014a truck-driving prankster\u2014that almost<\/em> fits. And it\u2019s a tidy theory, since the suspect has since died and wouldn\u2019t be inconvenienced by the accusation. In the end it\u2019s not clear what Scotland Yard\u2019s going to go with. Is a tidy but probably wrong explanation better, or an unsatisfactory mystery? Lem, as you might expect from somebody who lived in Communist Poland, suggests the authorities would rather be satisfied than right. The real horror isn\u2019t the walking dead\u2014it\u2019s the thought that the universe might be too big, random, and weird for human beings to get their heads around.<\/p>\n

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  1. \n

    Exceptions include Solaris<\/em>, natch.  ↩<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  2. \n

    The biggest problem with The Investigation<\/em> is that, as is often the case with older SF, it’s lopsidedly male. Only a handful of women appear and we\u2019re well into the novel before one even gets any lines. I\u2019m mentioning the biggest flaw in a footnote because it\u2019s an all too common problem in older SF, and not even an interesting problem. There\u2019s only so much I can think of to say about it beyond \u201cit\u2019s this<\/em> crap again.\u201d\u009d  ↩<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  3. \n

    I haven\u2019t read Lem\u2019s philosophical book Summa Technologiae<\/em><\/a>, but in it he apparently argues for something like the Singularity: eventually, he suspects, humans will reach the point where we have so much information we can\u2019t process it all.  ↩<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This year I read two Stanislaw Lem novels I’d never read before. The Invincible didn’t impress me, but The Investigation is one of his better books. The Investigation is Lem\u2019s take on the British mystery. As you might expect the subject isn\u2019t the usual mundane murder: Lieutenant Gregory of Scotland Yard is assigned to look … Continue reading A Very Confused Detective<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,45,9],"tags":[35,206],"class_list":["post-843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-mysteries","category-speculative-fiction","tag-science-fiction","tag-stanislaw-lem"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=843"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":846,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843\/revisions\/846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}