Czas apokalipsy : o iluzji inkluzywności w dystopijnej prozie Janusza A. Zajdla

As Janusz A. Zajdel’s - Polish most visionary social SF writer - novels have rarely been presented to the foreign literary public (except one maybe short story: Particularly Difficult Territory from Tales from the Planet Earth anthology), herein shall be discussed whether his fantastic visions (especially those dealing with the fall of utopian dreams) could be perceived as dystopian signals of forthcoming apocalypse. Along with concise analyses (and brief summaries) of Zajdel’s greatest novels - especially Paradyzja ("Paradisia") or Cylinder Van Troffa ("Van Troff’s Cylinder") - and pre-sumably one short story - Pod kloszem ("A Sheltered Life") - the paper will consider the relation between commonly affirmed vision of apocalypse and its influence on how the intrasystemic equilibrium may be sustained by the only right, logocentric truth. In Paradyzja dystopian society, threatened by a vision of the death in void, fulfils whatever is ordered to follow the totalitarian doctrine of space station orbiting around the planet of Tartarus. Tantamount to beehive, Paradyzja station subordinates quotidian life to the arguable necessities of the collective - only to preserve the state of formida-bility and to legitimize Lord’s of Logos protection over his patrocinium (Jacques Le Goff) from menacing apocalypse. Max Weberesque (from Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftlehre, 1951) gradation of ideal (separation, enhancement, creation) - the very essence of all utopia - reflects also excellently on lunar society in Cylinder Van Troffa that lives in qualms of factual apocalypse which officially has wiped out all life from Earth, making the Moon an only asylum for genetically pure refuges. Analogous con-ditions are lapidary described in a short story Pod kloszem (the title is ambiguous in Polish; it uses an untranslatable pun which links the basic meaning of "pod kloszem", that means "under the [lamp]shade", with the idiomatic meaning, that in English has an equivalent in "wrapping sb. in the cotton wool"), where whole cities are hidden under giant, synthetic spheres, theoretically compelled to provide ceaseless inflow of oxygen for all inhabitants. Henceforth one may claim that all given examples are an epitome of that kind of escapism which foresees the heterotopic (in Foucault’s meaning from essay Of other spaces) inclusion to be the only way to survive the upcoming apocalypse. Simultaneously all mentioned texts are diagnosing one thing: that heterotopic "sphere of idolum" (Mumford 1959), permanent, teleologically determined inclusiveness, is utter-mostly prone to be corrupted, distorted and reverted - only because the dystopian Lord of Logos (my humble alternation of Jacques Derrida’s term) persists in pre-cluding an in-clu-ded individual (protagonist) from gaining metasystemic - and, usually, His very own - knowledge. Eponymous "shape of the things to come" is in Janusz A. Zajdel’s works emerging from the shadow of peril: people in his dystopian realms are abidingly deceived by illusions, loosing evenly an ability to differ false from truth, utopia from dystopia and - paradise from hell. As such it seems vital to present the writer, whose novels may be read not only in accordance with flourishing studies in topography of literature, but also in the unfading light of utopian and social SF studies.