Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is a real feat of absurdity. How trite to simply describe it as Kafkaesque but there’s no escaping it. A nameless narrator wanders around “the Building” on a Mission he doesn’t understand, for days on end, meeting no one who makes sense, seeking refuge in bathrooms, wondering all the time whether any of it is real or it’s all just staged as part of his training. Wondering a lot more besides:
…in fact, I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle. And for an institution as everlasting as the Universe—certainly our Building was such an institution—the speed at which these meanderings and perturbations took place was of no consequence.
That disturbing image of randomness hangs over everything, and the more that happens to the narrator the more likely it almost seems. What else could really explain the convoluted sequence of events, meetings, suicides, killings, interrogations, confessions?
There are a few other explanations, entertained by the narrator, developed when he sneaks away to the bathroom to think, put forth by the freelancer or the priest. Some more likely than others, some more disturbing than others. Perhaps the most seductive is the theory of double, triple, quadruple agents, with its myths of even higher -tuples, where everyone in the Building works for the Antibuilding, but it’s okay because everyone in the Antibuilding works for the Building.
The Building, for all its passes, guards, and secret agents, is fortunately not simply the setting for bare, tedious totalitarianism, or anything like that. It’s much more about surreal and dream-like happenings, disturbing in a different way. Jokes and codes and hidden identities and non sequiturs and unmaskings. And no answers.
Lem’s language, at least as brought to me by his translators (Michael Kandel and Christine Rose), is not spectacular, but there are bright points. The names of the first agents our narrator meets, a few jokes, and once in a while some real play: “What in heaven’s name was I doing here among these loathsome lowlifes, participating in this revolting, pitiful binge of petty bureaucrats, this crude carousal of clerks?”
Tomorrow I’ll tell the real secret of Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, the thing that made me read it: the introduction.
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