A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem

intellect). He did not comprehend that literature always is parasitic on the mind of the reader. Love, a tree, a park, a sigh, an earache—the reader understands, because the reader has experienced it. It is possible, of course, with a book to rearrange the furniture inside a reader’s head, but only to the extent that there is some furniture there already, before the reading.
    He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation? The antinovel wished to pattern itself after mathematics; mathematics, surely, yields nothing real! Yes, but mathematics does not lie, for it does only what it must. It operates under the constraint of necessities that it does not invent on the spur of the moment; the method is given to it, which is why the discoveries of mathematicians are genuine, and why, too, their horror is genuine when the method leads them to a contradiction. The writer, because he does not operate under such necessity, because he is so free, can only enter into his quiet negotiations with the reader; he urges the reader kindly to assume ... to believe ... to accept as good coin ... but this is a game, and not the blessed bondage in which mathematics thrives. Total freedom is total paralysis in literature.
    Of what are we speaking? Of Mme Solange’s novel. Let us begin with the observation that this pretty name may be read variously, depending on the context in which it is placed. In French it can be Sun and Angel
(Sol, Ange).
In German it will be merely the name of an interval of time (so
lange
—so long). The absolute autonomy of language is arrant nonsense; humanists have believed in it out of naïveté—to which naïveté, however, the cybernetics people had no right. Machines to translate faithfully, indeed! No word, no whole sentence has meaning in itself, within its own trench and boundary. Borges came close to this state of affairs when, in his story “Pierre Menard, the Author of
Don Quixote
,” he described a literary fanatic, the eccentric Menard, who after a great number of intellectual preparations wrote
Don Quixote a second time,
word for word, not copying down Cervantes but—as it were—immersing himself totally in the latter’s creative milieu. But the place in which Borges’s short story touches on the secret is this following passage:
    â€œA comparison of the pages of Menard and Cervantes is highly revealing. The latter, for example, wrote
(Don Quixote,
Part One, Chapter XIX): ‘...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, the repository of deeds, the witness of the past, the pattern and the caution for the present day, and the lesson for future ages.’
    â€œThis catalogue, published in the seventeenth century, penned by the ‘layman genius’ Cervantes, is simply a rhetorical encomium to history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: '...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, the repository of deeds, the witness of the past, the pattern and the caution for the present day, and the lesson for future ages.’
    â€œHistory as the mother of truth; the idea is extraordinary. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not characterize history as the study of reality but as its source. Historical truth, for him, is not that which has taken place; it is that which we believe has taken place. The concluding phrases—the pattern and the caution for the present day, the lesson for future ages—are unabashedly pragmatic.”
    This is something more than a literary joke and poking fun; it is the pure and simple truth, which the absurdity of the idea itself (to write
Don Quixote a second time!)
in no way lessens. For in fact what fills every sentence with meanings is the context of the given period; that which was “innocent rhetoric” in the seventeenth