When these pieces were eventually published as the 2001 book Dyktanda (its full Polish title can be translated as ‘Dictations, or Rather How Uncle Staszek Taught Then Michaś, Now Michał, to Write Without Errors’), some 30 years after they had been originally produced, they caused quite an uproar. One piece in particular, which presents itself as a rather detailed recipe for cooking a boy’s liver (after he was hit by a car) and serving it (with onions) as a delicacy, was met with a very strong reaction from conservative Catholic circles, or rather their political representatives.
The story parodied the language of a culinary recipe, but it was also an obvious transgression on the cultural taboo of cannibalism. Still it comes a little bit as a surprise that when the piece was included in a national orthographical contest, Lem was accused of ‘promoting cannibalism, and ultimately a civilisation of death’.
It is certainly true that many of these pieces stand in rather stark contrast to what is traditionally expected of school exercises, namely paedagogic intention and moral edification. As Lem scholar Jerzy Jarzębski has pointed out, this indeed is a ‘disrespectful’ Lem, bent on acts of provocation directed against the obligatory schoolbook rhetorics, with their fundamental quality of ‘good-naturedness’.
But Jarzębski also argues that this provocation on Lem’s part did not reflect his true moral code and humanist values. Lem might have been experimenting, but he was certainly ‘not ready to make ethical concessions to cynicism and criminal acts’. The scholar pointed to Lem’s The Cyberiad and Fables for Robots, which were written around the same time, and argued that despite ‘many really cruel scenes, the moral spine of these stories remains intact, as is the case of fairy tales’. He conceded that in literature it’s possible for cynicism to be present in a work’s style – and yet this does not mean ‘that it [ie. cynicism] infects the general meaning of the work’.
While this may certainly be true of literature in general, perhaps today it might also be worth seeing the dyktanda as something more than just a playful exhibition of cynicism and literary provocation on Lem’s part. And rather a testimony to his complex and complicated inner world.
Orthography drill as psychotherapy