This is an essay about Stanislaw Lem's book Solaris I wrote for a course on the aesthetics of science fiction at Skidmore in 1996.
Solaris is partly a didactic story--a parable (a form common to the Bible, where a short narrative about one thing is really about ‘something else’--the ‘something else’ having a bearing on human behavior, life, etc. In short, a disguised narrative with a moral). Discuss Solaris on the parable level.
Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris is a gem in the genre of science fiction because it is one of a unique subset of stories whose cognitive basis is sufficiently complex and complete for it to tell a compelling story at more than one level at one time. At the plot level Solaris is a detective story about a main character, Kris Kelvin’s, attempt to understand his strange new surroundings at the science outpost on the foreign world of Solaris. Kelvin’s quest to comprehend his environment takes place within the context of a scientific investigation, in which the Solaristists (scientists who study Solaris) are trying to make contact with the strange ‘living’ alien ocean covering the planet. The surface narrative is also partly a love story. A bizarre love triangle emerges with our main character Kelvin at the center and his wife Rhyea representing both other points in this peculiar affair. One version of Rhyea, the real Rhyea, is Kelvin’s dead wife who killed herself at Kelvin’s goading several years ago, and whose memory continues to haunt him. The other Rhyea is a phi-creature, a phantom person, a projection of Kelvin’s deep guilt and shame made manifest in physical form. This replicate Rhyea, we learn was modeled by the living ocean of Solaris out of neutrinos and shaped by the memories locked in Kelvin’s repressed subconscious.
What makes Solaris most compelling, however, is that in addition to these surface level stories Lem has a deeper agenda, a moral which he communicates via the interplay of character and plot. The basic maxim of this parable, as Darko Suvin points out, is “the erroneousness of pretending to total knowledge of any complex situation.” (Suvin/Lem handout) Lem plays with modern science’s egotism in this regard in a satirical manner when he describes the vast library on the science outpost of Solaris.
Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes--all classics on the history of Solaris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese’s monumental an already relatively obsolescent monograph. (Lem, 110)
It is as if the Solaristists tried to drown the unexplained phenomena of the living ocean in a larger sea of empirical observation and analysis. Yet for all the man hours spent observing, categorizing, and theorizing, the phenomena has remained inexplicable. As a result the scientists began taking their aggression and angst out on fellow scientists whose theories did not jive with the currently accepted collective misconceptions.
As Thomas Kuhn, philosopher of science, noted, normal science is an “enterprise [that] seems to attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the [scientific discipline’s] paradigm supplies.” (Kuhn, 24) Lem takes this notion about the nature of scientific inquiry and turns it back on itself. As Suvin described it, “Man always projects his mental models upon the foreign universe; on Solaris, the universe obligingly materializes one such projection. Thus the stars are for Lem... A parabolic mirror for ourselves.” (Suvin/Lem). Trying to comprehend, contact, or communicate with Solaris is like trying to point a TV camera back at the monitor. What you get back is craziness, a unstable visual feedback loop as the watcher tries to watch himself watching. (See Figure 1, from Douglas Hofstadter’s book, “The Mind’s I” which demonstrates some of the bizarre and unusual patterns that can be generated by pointing a camera back at the TV it is projecting on.) The projections that Solaris sends out in response to the Solarists’ inquiries represent the physical manifestations of their deepest fears and desires. The forced self examination of one’s most intense feelings and passions materialized in an indestructible, inescapable concrete form would be more than most people could take. The experience drives Gibarian to suicide, Sartouius to seclusion, and leads to near paralysis in Snow. Only Kelvin is partially able to confront his fears, manifest in the form of his dead wife Rhyea.
The moral in this story seems to be that any attempt to understand a truly alien civilization by a process of anthropomorphizing normal human existence is doomed to failure. This is the case because any alien civilization is just that, alien, separate, non-coterminous with normal human existence. Attempts to understand a completely unique and different situations by stretching normative ideas around the new phenomena will simple result in a distorted normative conjecture, not any deeper understanding of the new form of existence.