SOURCE: “Epistemological Chagrin: The Literary and Philosophical Antecedents of Stanislaw Lem's Romantic Misanthrope,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter, 1994, pp. 319–29.

In the following essay, Cheever examines Lem's skeptical attitude toward the problem of human knowledge in His Master's Voice and the protagonist's “feeling of embarrassment rather than despair in light of mankind's limitations.”

Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice is not only a fascinating and entertaining novel but also a complex and profound meditation upon what might happen if humanity were to receive a possible “message from the stars” and find itself incapable of deciding what kind of message had been received, much less what it might mean. Lem's book is literally a “first-contact” novel but, ironically, it is a contact between living beings (mankind) and a thing (a phenomenon which, whether a message or not, remains totally incomprehensible to men). For although mankind speculates ingeniously about both the “message...