lem's solaris: certain and uncertain readings

8/14/2019 Lem's Solaris: Certain and Uncertain Readings

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Science Fiction Studies#35 = Volume 12, Part 1 = March 1985

Istvan sicser!"ona!, $r

%he &oo' is the (lien) *n ertain and +ncertain eadins

o- .em/s Solaris

1. Contemporary science describes a world that is neither a rationalcosmos, nor a roiling chaos, but something in between: a source of paradox,allowing for complementary, but contradictory, interpretations of humanity'srelationship with non_human reality. The "classical" myth of the rationalcosmos had shared with the prescientific myths underlying humanistic

culture the conception that the human and natural realms were in someways co-ordinated. Both wored according to intelligible, self-consistent,determining laws. !n the system of modern atomic physics, howeer,scientists hae succeeded, according to #lanc, in purging science ofdeterminism and "all anthropomorphic elements" $%rendt: &(). But as*eisenberg obsered, in such a deanthropomorphi+ed unierse humanbeings always "confront themseles alone" (ibid., p. &). ince eeryanswer they attain in their inestigations into nature is a specific answer to aspecific uestion, the sum of these answers allows the application ofotherwise uite incompatible types of natural laws to one and the samephysical eent. cience's answers reflect the uestions scientists are

impelled to as of nature/ and thus anthropomorphism is reintroduced at theleel of hypothesis formation that preselects the data to be studied. Beyondthis, it remains extremely problematic whether the seemingly unbridgeablegulf between the languages of human culture and uantum physics' purelyprobabilistic and mathematical expressions of the unierse will produce "anappropriate widening of the conceptual framewor" to resole all the presentparadoxes and disharmonies in a new "logical frame," as 0iels Bohr hoped$see %rendt: &)1and as radical holistic physicists lie 2rit3of 4apra haeproposed1or whether the gulf is inherent in the new physics. Theconclusions of the &5th century's science hae thus introduced an alienationfrom the cosmos more radical than any preiously conceied in human

culture. 6hether this alienation is the beginning of a dialectical process ofconceptual synthesis or an enormous stalemate, we cannot now. 6e cannotsummarily re3ect either historical hypothesis.

2 characteristically transforms scientific and technological ideas intometaphors, by which those ideas are gien cultural releance. !t wors erymuch lie historical fiction in this respect. !t taes a body of extratextualpropositions belieed to be true, with no inherent ethical-cultural


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significance, and endows it with meaning by incorporating it in fictionalstories about characters representing typical alues of the author's culture.%lthough the historical facts limit what can happen in historical fiction $in therealistic mode, at least), these facts are embedded among purely fictionalfacts to imply a metaphorical meaning beyond historiography's customary

function of describing "what really happened." !n historical fiction, history isno longer true history, een if it is in fact true. !t is metaphorical, and hence"more than true"/ it is culturally significant.

The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, about 2. 2urthermore, in wors ofartistic interest, we also expect the fictional action and the process ofreading to correspond analogically to the fiction's metaphori+ed scientificideas. 7eading the fiction should act as a metaphor for the process ofcognition implied by the science. !n general, it is futile to loo for this sort ofharmony of scientific ideas and aesthetic design in contemporary 2. eeralcommentators hae noted that 2 writers usually adhere to the paradigms of

romance $cf. 7ose: , 2rye: 8(). The paradigmatic forms of 2 are usuallymore archaic, indeed prescientific, than much of so called mainstreamfiction.

9ne boo is an exception, howeer: tanislaw em's Solaris, one of thephilosophically most sophisticated wors of 2. em has often dismissed thesuggestion that 2 should be 3udged by criteria different from the rest ofliterature.;


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scientists to understand the mysterious, sentient ocean_planet, olaris, hasproduced only a chain_reaction of paradoxes. The instruments that the earlyolarists tae to the planet to measure certain phenomena return to themphysically transformed by olaris/ the researchers thus cannot now what itis they hae measured (Solaris, 2:27).The methodological paradoxes

produced by the exploration of olaris, which are extrapolations of classicalscientific method, come to occupy most of the olarists' time. Theinscrutable and opaue planet gradually becomes a macrocosmic mirror ofthe human image. The olarists' obsession with the mysteries of olarisdissoles into the broader struggle to understand human reflection andidentity. 6hen it appears impossible that human scientists will eer breaout of the enclosure of human consciousness, their space explorationappears to be a religious uest for "4ontact," mystical union with a godlieintelligence that might reeal the purpose of the "mission of >anind" in theunierse, and redeem it from cosmic alienation.

By the time the narrator, the olarist psychologist =ris =elin, arries onolaris tation, hoering a mile aboe the planet's surface, the theoreticalparadoxes of olaristics hae taen on an unnering solidity. The olaristprotagonists are "isited" by human simulacra, which appear to beincarnations of the scientists' repressed erotic and guilt fixations. 6e cannotnow the purpose of these ?isitors, as the olarists euphemistically callthem, or how they arried on the space station. They merely appear whentheir hosts awaen after a dream_filled sleep. They may be gifts from theplanet, or instruments of exploration, or merely augmentations of thescientists' unconscious thoughts. The ?isitors disorient the scientistscompletely by displaying the uintessence of each man's sub3ectiity in the

form of an inscrutable ob3ect. @ach olarist deals with his confusion in adifferent way. =elin's friend and teacher, Aibarian, unable to contemplate"murdering" the uasi_human beings, ills himself instead/ the pedanticphysicist artorius locs himself in his laboratory, emerging only after he hasinented a deice to annihilate the ?isitors/ the cyberneticist nowtaes todrin, irony, and self_pity1in fear and trembling. 9nly =elin proes openand "innocent" enough to attempt to accommodate the presence of his?isitor, a replica of his young wife 7heya, for whose suicide ten years earlierhe has carried a deep sense of guilt.

%t first, the ?isitors are indestructible, and appear to be material copies of an

ideal template. 6hen they are e3ected into space, new ersions of themreappear on the station later. They now only what their hosts remember,and for obscure reasons they must stay within sight of those hosts. !n time,howeer, they become increasingly autonomous, and seem to deelophuman consciousness. !n the central loe story between =elin and 7heya,7heya appears to become een more human than the true human olarists1by willingly accepting her death in order to free her loer from his grotesueattachment to her.


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The transformation in the noel occurs with =elin's disillusionment: hisrecognition that 7heya is not a human being, and that his inappropriateloyalty to her, which was motiated by earthly guilt and loe, has ept himfrom the wor to which he had deoted his life: encountering the 9ther1theplanet olaris. =elin is compelled to recogni+e that in a world defined by the

encounter of the human with a non_human intelligence, the most noblehuman alues may be only uixotic illusions. *is awareness of his diminutioncomes in stages, with great suffering. 2irst, he must renounce his romanticfaith. %t the end of the noel, still mourning 7heya, he prepares to return to@arth "a sadder and wiser man"/ "! shall neer again gie myself completelyto anything or anybody...and this =elin will be no less worthy a man thanthe =elin of the past, who was prepared for anything in the name of theambitious pro3ect called 4ontact. 0or will any man hae the right to 3udgeme" $;8:&5).

ie all the positie assertions made by the protagonists of the noel, this

self_diminution uicly turns ambiguous. !n order not to return to @arthwithout haing eer physically touched_down on the planet, =elin descendsto the surface before he leaes. There he plays the game of extending hishand to the ocean, which responds by eneloping it, without actuallytouching it. %lthough no physical contact is made, =elin is deeply affected,and feels "somehow changed. "

! had neer felt the gigantic presence sostrongly, or its powerful changelesssilence, or the secret forces that gaethe waes their regular rise and fall. ! sat

unseeing and san into a unierse ofinertia, glided down an inisible slope,and identified myself with the dumb,fluid colossus/ it was as if ! had forgienit eerything, without the slightest effortor thought. $;8:&;5)

=elin does not leae after all. *e allows himself to beliee in "a chance,perhaps an infinitesimal one, perhaps only imaginary" $;8:&;;), that somenew manifestation of contact or shared creation will occur. 6e surmise hisegoistic pro3ections are spent: "! hoped for nothing, and yet lied in

expectation. ! did not now what achieements, what mocery, een whattortures awaited me. ! new nothing and persisted in the faith that the timeof cruel miracles was not past" $;8:&;;).

>ost critics agree that in his concluding words =elin has attained a newstate of alertness and awareness. *is formerly aggressie drie for 4ontacthas gien way to a more serene receptiity. tephen C. #otts $p. D;) belieesthat at this point =elin "has become...an empty slate ready to receie the


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unierse on its own terms." 2or >ar 7ose, =elin finally comes to therecognition that the 9ther does in fact exist separately from himself: "henows that the ocean is real and he is willing to commit himself to whateerthe future may bring" $p. (D). 2or Earo uin, "=elin wins through to apainfully gained, proisional and relatie faith in an Fimperfect god' " $p.

&&5). @en Eaid =etterer, who argues persuasiely for the hermetic closureof Solaris, writes that "=elin does learn something of man's limits: they arecircumscribed by the reality of olaris" $p. ;().

The gist of Solaris in this reading is that human consciousness could notproceed to a new cognition as long as it was trapped in its ownhuman_centered, egocentric conception of reason. 9nly a catharticencounter with an alien reality insistent and intrusie enough to iolate themembrane of self_sufficient human self_awareness could dissole thescientists' repressed emotional fixations and initiate a new receptiity to theunierse outside the self1a nowledge that something 9ther not only exists,

but can transform the self. This reading $which ! hae admittedly fleshed outa bit) inoles not so much a paradox as a hidden contradiction. !f we are tobeliee that =elin is actually purged of illusions at the end of the tale, wemust accept the reality of olaris as a determinate 9ther, whose"not_humanness" defines =elin for himself, and the reader. But how did=elin come by this new ability to see himself ob3ectiely, if human cognitionis a priori anthropomorphicG To see himself determinately1that is, "to learnsomething of man's limits," as =etterer writes1=elin must hae been ableto see himself as a "not_human," an ability that he could only hae learnedfrom contact with olaris. The critics who hold that =elin arries at a newstate of humbled and purified cognition conseuently also approe the uest

for "*oly 4ontact," since only the acuisition of the 9ther's point of iewcould hae both dispelled =elin's illusions and gien him nowledge ofhimself. !f this is true, then =elin has redeemed the romantic impulses ofolaristics by proing their truths. *is identification with the alien might beread as the necessary inersion that concludes the successful religiousuest, 3ust as the discoery of the Arail was to end in translation andabsorption into Aod.

Before coming to olaris tation, =elin's contribution to olaristics had beenthe discoery of possible correlations between encephalographic patternsindicatie of certain human emotions with formally similar patterns taen

from olaris $;; :;H&_H). To put it another way, =elin had discoered whatcould be construed as "personal" and emotional actiity in the planet. %t theconclusion of the noel, the situation is reersed. *e substitutes for thepersonification of the alien his own self_identification with the alien1i.e.,alienation from the human. The uasi_religious uest for 4ontact, rather thanbeing an illusion to eep humanity from despair, apparently paid off after all:miracles hae occurred, een if they are cruel ones, and >an has placed onefoot beyond his human limits, albeit into a mysterious and undefined


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dimension. !t is an apocalypse, of sorts. Therefore, man's nowledge is notlimited to himself and his creations.

But is this reading alidG !s =elin really as empty at the end of the noel as#otts claims, "ready to accept the unierse on its own terms"G Eoes not the

unierse include =elin, and the human species, among its termsG Eoesn't=elin's identification with the alien leae us once again with no way ofdetermining where the human ends and the 9ther beginsG

9nly #atric #arrinder has, to my nowledge, challenged the preailing ideathat =elin ultimately succeeds in breaing out of the anthropocentric hall ofmirrors to the doorway of new cognition. 2or #arrinder, =elin's decision tostay by the alien planet parallels Aullier's infatuation with the rationalhorses in his last 3ourney. The noel's ending, #arrinder writes, shows

the fate of a man who has abandoned

humanity for the alien, and so is tragicbut also absurd, a symbolic gestureholding at bay the recognition of despair.=elin has followed through the logic ofthe scientist_explorer in theliberal_humanist tradition, until he isfinally a ictim of an isolating romanticobsession. $p. D8)

To carry #arrinder's reading a step further: =elin deserts humanity in ordernot to face the despair of nowing that his species is a singularity in the

cosmos, and that reason, desire, loe, and truth1een the ideas of self andother1are merely tautologies in the isolated, self_reinforcing system of the"human. "

!f, as =elin tells us, he is completely committed to awaiting new interactionswith olaris, are we to admire his renewed spirit of sacrifice and dedication inthe cause of 4ontact, or to suspect itG *ow are we to 3udge what we readG Tochoose either interpretation, =elin as Arail =night or as Aullier, we musthae a standard against which to compare each interpretation1and that isprecisely what we cannot hae in Solaris,3ust as the olarists hae no realityagainst which to compare humanity and the ocean_planet.

olaris's alienness is so threatening to the olarists' scientific egoism thatnone of their conscious hypotheses regarding the planet can be taen at facealue. till, there is eidence in the noel to support the idea that somemysterious and significant contact has been achieed between =elin andthe planet. There are moments in the action not interpreted by theprotagonists $particularly haing to do with 7heya, and with =elin'sdreams), and these bear hints of a special, non-rational relationship between


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olaris and =elin that could easily go by the name of 4ontact. !n the firstplace, 7heya appears to be the co-operatie creation of =elin and olaris: ifshe is a pro3ection, she is a pro3ection of both, since her form is produced by=elin's unconscious memory and her substance is produced by the planet.6e cannot now exactly what the ?isitors' purpose is, but 7heya beliees

she may be "an instrument" $8:D;) of some sort $perhaps analogous to theolarists' instruments transformed by olaris in the early stages ofexploration). 9n the assumption that olaris may hae "read off" the ?isitorsfrom the dreams of the sleeping scientists after they had begun bombardingthe planet with x_rays at night $:H&), the olarists encode some of =elin'swaing thoughts and broadcast these by day, to "inform" olaris of howmuch suffering the ?isitors are causing. The idea is farfetched, and it seemsto be a way of distracting =elin's attention from artorius and now'sattempt to inent a neutrino_annihilator to be used against the ?isitors1adeice =elin would lie to sabotage, to preent 7heya's destruction. %s=elin's encephalographic patterns are broadcast, howeer, he becomes

increasingly sensitie to direct intuitions of "an inisible presence which hastaen possession of the tation" $;&:;H). >oreoer, the annihilated ?isitorsdo not reappear after the emissions hae been completed, implying that themessage must hae "gone through."

>ost suggestie of all is =elin's weird "dream" in 4hapter ;& $"TheEreams"). The language of the dream passage is worth close attention, buthere ! can only note that the entire dream can be read as if it were beingnarrated by either =elin or olaris, which is for a while humanly "informed"by =elin's thoughts. To mae sense of this dream, for which =elin proidesno commentary, we are inited to conclude that =elin and olaris penetrate

each ocher to create a being1"a womanG" $;&:;H), doubtless 7heya1andthen to experience the excruciating suffering of a mysterious dissection. %tthe dream's conclusion, the narrator obseres hisIits suffering as "amountain of grief isible in the da++ling light of another world" $ibid.).6hoeer the obserer here might be, this indeterminate process ofincarnation implicates both =elin and olaris1as if each were perceiing itthrough the other in some inarticulable way.

!f these are moments of direct contact bypassing the mediations ofegocentric rationality, then we can conclude that some exchange actuallydoes occur between the human and the alien, the self and the 9ther. now

speculates that through the ?isitors olaris may be learning about mortality,and the increasing human autonomy of the ?isitors may sere 3ust thispurpose. $"!t implores us to help it die with eery one of its creations"J;&:;(&K, he tells =elin.) ince olaris's power to stabili+e matter extendsfrom massless neutrinos to its own orbit around two suns, it is possible thatthe planet experiences the pain of death for the first time through theannihilation of the ?isitors. $This speculation is 3ustified also by The "piercingscream which came from no human throat" J;&:;(5K, probably the death


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agony of artorius's ?isitor, that awaens =elin one night.) Through 7heyaspecifically, olaris may hae learned dhe ethical and affectie essence ofthe human, the ability to transform necessary death into liberating self-sacrifice for the sae of loed ones. =elin, in turn, appears to loosen hisclutch on his narcissistic self pro3ections, and comes to identify himself with

the planet and to "forgie" it, attaining an almost super_human patience.

3. These are suggestive passages, and they resist interpretation asanything other than moments of non_rational, non_conscious exchange1true moments of contact so surpassing the common run of humancommunication that they could well be mistaen for religious inspiration.till, the fundamental indeterminacy of Solaris will not let us accept anyinterpretation based only on what =elin, our sole informant, tells us. 9ncethe uestion is raised whether we can "see" something that is not apro3ection of human consciousness, we cannot mae a purely rational orob3ectie determination one way or the other. 7eaders of Solaris are

olarists, too1the phenomena of the noel's action reach us in the languageof a olarist and psychologist whose own reflections on how hypotheses aregenerated anticipate and subsume most of the hypotheses the reader mightcome up with independently. Cust as the indeterminacy of olaris deflects itsexplorers bac into doubt about their methods of interpreting phenomena,the indeterminacy of the eidence in Solaris deflects us bac into doubtabout our own methods of reading.

em has constructed Solaris in such a way that eery apparently significantelement in the text corresponds to other significant elements, creating a hallof mirrors with no windows from which to obsere some priileged

noncorresponding structure of things. 7ose and =etterer hae demonstratedin their readings of the noel that symbolic images reflect one another to asuffocating degree/ in Solaris, =etterer writes $eoing *eisenberg), "manconfronts only analogues of his own image" $p. &5;). %llusions to theliterature of illusion extend this doubling from the internal action of the taleto the status of the boo and reader in the world outside the text. 2orexample, em reuires us to accept 7omanticism's faorite deices ofdoubling and self-reflection simply to follow the manifestly realistic plot.Ahosts, mirrors, dreams, unconscious memories and impulses, a web ofsymbolic correspondences, eerily enclosed spaces and sublime oids allfunction as empirically concrete "ob3ects" in a scientific mystery. 0ames

appear to be allusie, and perhaps een allegorical: =elin,7heya,8artorius, naut, %ndre Berton, 2echner, the designations of thespaceships (Prometheus, Ulysses, Laocoon, Alaric), een olaris itself. Butsince we cannot be sure exactly how these allusions wor or whether they allwor the same way, or een whether they are arbitrary red herrings 3ustimitating allusions,Dthe extratextual things to which they refer also lose theirsolidity, and are absorbed into the boo's world of indeterminate elements.


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6e now only that they correspond. 6e do not now what thesecorrespondences mean.

To create een broader ironies, em inoes a whole library of romance,satire, and myth: Eon Luixote, Aullier, #oe's phantom loers, the Arail

Luest, the tale of @ros and #syche, @cho and 0arcissus, the #assion and the4reation. ince the manifest problem of the olarists and readers is how todetermine whether human consciousness can now anything other thanitself, each of the myths and stories inoed in the boo becomes a ersionof the same problem1and thus each is transformed into a ersionof Solaris. %gain, we are shown 6estern culture's problems and the creationsresponding to them reflecting one another. But what do these reflectionssignifyG The infinite play of mutually reflecting pro3ections, or theappropriation of transcendental nowledgeG

The problem is raised iidly, neer to be dispelled, when =elin comes upon

the dead Aibarian's ?isitor, a gigantic %frican woman, who reclines soft andwarm and alie next to Aibarian's corpse in the space station's free+er.Thrown into a panic, =elin wonders whether what he is seeing is reality or ahallucination. *e tries to concoct a controlled experiment to test his sanity,but he nows that his conclusions can proe nothing. % deranged mind'sillusions of certainty are indistinguishable from a sane mind's nowledge.4onsciousness can neer mae an ob3ect out of itself for ob3ectieobseration. =elin lands on an apparent solution: he sets up a complicatedproblem of calculation, which he then matches with the precalculatedconclusions of an independently orbiting satellite computer, on theassumption that he would not be able to match the computer's speed een

in a hallucination. 6hen the numbers mesh, he beliees he hasdemonstrated the reality of the ?isitors. !t is a persuasie tactic, but once theseed of doubt has taen root it cannot be pulled up. 4ould not =elin haedreamed the satellite's results as wellG 6ho can determine the limits of themind's power of pro3ectionG 0eer in reading Solaris can we establish ahierarchy of phenomena or significations stable enough for us to interpreteents unambiguously. 6e can neer tell what is the "real" structure ofeents and what are the deiations. 0one of the protagonists' consciousassertions is aboe suspicion. The olarists are desperate men. They arefaced not only with an alien reality resistant to their reason, but also, in the?isitors, with their most familiar and unattractie seles out in the light of

day.

!n the final analysis, we hae no way of determining whether olaris is notthe collectie hallucination of the whole human species, lie the "monsters ofthe id" in the film orbidden Planet. 9r, inersely, whether the humanspecies is not the hallucination of the dreaming "ocean yogi" olaris,corresponding to the *indu notion of maya. 6e cannot tell what is thereferent and what is the referring term. 9ur inability to determine =elin's


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fate one way or another is part of the necessary irony of the epistemologicalproblem created by em's alien. 0o definition of the 9ther $and, of course, ofthe self) is possible without reference to a standard that transcends both theself and the 9ther. But how can such a thing be conceied "scientifically"G!n Solaris's ma+e of correspondences, enclosures, and reflections, what we

and the olarists lac is something that would be non-corresponding, a"meta-alien" structure that would not mean anything: something asdeterminately different from the dialectical unity of self and 9ther as self and9ther are from each other. But, of course, that is what neither science northe reader can hae.

4. In the conclusion of his boo Fantastyka i futurologia (Scienceiction and uturolo!y)em discusses the techniues he beliees areappropriate methods for expressing authentically the semantic problems ofscientific technological culture in contemporary fiction. 2or em, modernliterature eoles through the conflict between the ruling cultural codes of

empiricism and the writer's need to hae a coherent set of normatie rules ofsocial conduct upon which, or against which, to base artistic norms. 6esternculture's dominant empiricism is in fact a set of anti-codes. "2or empiricism,"em writes, "the only iniolable barrier is the totality of attributes of nature itcalls the body of natural laws. Thus, obsering the human world from anempirical standpoint necessarily leads to the complete relatii+ation ofcultural norms eerywhere where they impose Funfounded' imperaties andrestraints" $">etafantasia": &).

Traditionally, art wored with structures deried from mythical-religiousconcepts that antedated scientific rationalism. These concepts reinforced

certain social codes by presenting the culture and its axioms as sacred andunuestionable. The realm of human decisions was iewed as part of acosmic order and was gien alue because of its cosmic resonances.@mpiricism, according to em, was 6estern culture's "Tro3an horse," becauseof its success in dissoling from within those cultural norms not based onutility and comfort. %rtists in the modern age hae been unable to find newaxiogenic structures to replace the sacred mythological ones that secularscience eroded. *ybridi+ation techniues abound but original, self consistentethical and aesthetic structures can not deelop where norms are constantlysub3ect to rational criticism and technological innoation.

#arody of myth is one obious and already traditional solution/ but it ispurely critical, and entirely dependent on the myths it parodies. embeliees that two radical methods of "cunning structuration" $">etafantasia":8) are particularly appropriate for &5th_century writers in the age ofindeterminacy. The first is to gie "the total structure of a wor amultidimensional Findeterminacy,'" a techniue em associates with=afa's "he #astle.The writer seals up different modes of signification in thewor's structure in such a way that the reader is gien all the clues


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necessary to accept that the wor signifies in a unified way, but not how todetermine the significance of that unity, i.e., $hat the wor means."=afa's "he #astle,% according to em," can be read as a caricature oftranscendence, a *eaen maliciously dragged down to @arth and moced, orin precisely the opposite way, as the only image of transcendence aailable

to a fallen humanity.... 6ors lie this do not expose those main 3uncturesthat could reeal their unambiguous ontological meanings/ and the constantuncertainty this produces is the structural euialent of the existentialsecret." $">etafantasia": 8)

The other approach em singles out is the manifest interpenetration ofincongruous structures and paradigmatic forms1some harmonious, somedissonant, and some changing their relations in the course of the fiction'sdeelopment. ie =afa's techniue, such writing denies the reader anabsolute system of relations by which to interpret relatie systems. ome ofthe structures might be so diergent that they distort and "damage" the

information produced by the other structures/ at other times, conergencesmight occur fortuitously. The most radical model of this techniue, in em'siew, is the 2rench nou&eau roman, and especially the wor of 7obbe-Arillet,where een chance enters as a constitutie structure to create a clashbetween the paradigmatic forms of order and chaos $">etafantasia": D).

Both of these techniues of "cunning structuration" are adeuate to thephilosophical problems raised by indeterminacy. 2or the writer who weaensthe reader's sense of certainty by weaening the culturally priilegedconentions of fiction also weaens the reader's sense of certainty about theworld to which the fiction's language is belieed to refer.

Because of this systematic refusal tospea plainly, the reader begins to feelunsure whether he or she reallyunderstands what the description isconcretely about, and this gies rise tothe semantic waering thatcharacteri+es the reception of modernpoetry .... These approaches hae acommon origin: as the leel of thereception's indeterminacy rises, the

reader's own personal determinationsbegin to waer. !n practice, it is oftenimpossible to determine whether a giennarratie structure is only ery indirectand elliptical, but essentiallyhomogeneous, or one deliberatelydamaged by 'chance noise,' or eenperforated, softened and bent by


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another, discordant structure.2urthermore, since one can also createmultilayered structures, een theconcrete uality of the described ob3ector situation can be transformed beyond

recognition and reshaped from one leelof articulation to another. Thus it is oftenimpossible to determine categoricallywhether the basic structure ofdescription is an image of order or ofchaos. $">etafantasia": ).

>any of the problems of interpreting Solaris eaporate in the light of em'smeditations on modernism, for em conflates these two ways of creatingsemantic indeterminacy in the design of his noel. The similarityof Solaris to "he #astle is readily apparent: the planet is =elin's 4astle.

6hether it will yield its secret or not, =elin insists that it has a secret toyield, and that he has been "called" to plot its dimensions, lie theland_sureyor =. !nstead of opening the transcendental significance of thecosmos to him, olaris remains opaue, "communicating" with him throughinscrutable messengers, the ?isitors. 9nce these obstructie messengers arecleared away, =elin beliees he is, 3ust as #otts puts it, an empty slateready to be inscribed upon by the demiurgic 9ther. The alien intelligenceproides humanind with a glimpse of its long-sought %rchimedean point inthe unierse only to show how inaccessible it is. Solaris might be profitablyread as a gloss on =afa's remar that >an "found the %rchimedean point,but he used it against himself/ it seems he was permitted to find it only

under this condition" $%rendt: &H). %t the same time, since the 9ther is $bydefinitionG) totally inscrutable, =elin, lie =., accepts that his humancognition and his nowledge of his place in the unierse are corrupt in theiressence. Both =elin and =. follow the lead of Aullier, who would rather be ahorse.

em punctuates and deforms this =afa-lie ambiguity with a ersion of heother "system of indeterminacy" he associates with literary modernism, themutual interference of narratie structures which outside the text appear asclear and distinct, een mutually contradictory. This method creates theinerse effect to the impenetrable mystery of "dine structural euialent of

the existential secret.'' The reader is made to feel that the elements ofnarratie are all familiar, "taen from the repertoire of culturally nownsituations" inoing "the repertoire of possible issues appropriate for JthemK" $">etafantasia": )/ yet in their incongruous conflation, they seem"perforated, softened and bent" by one another $ibid.,p. ). The hardopacity of the unyielding secret is complemented by the nauseating fluidityof the familiar when facing that opacity.


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!. This sense of distortion through "softening" of order comes aboutspontaneously in the action of Solaris.The arious self consistent modelsthat the protagonists1and readers1of the noel use to interpret themysterious action lose their distinctions. These putatiely sharply definedsystems for articulating reality are transformed into a single fluid process

whose only articulation is its difference from the sentient planet.

!n a world ruled by positie rationality $the implied epistemology of 6esternconsciousness in Solaris), certain culturally priileged structures of cognitionthrough which writers mae sense of the natural and social worlds $such asphysics, biology, psychoanalysis, psychochemistry, romantic loe, religiousfaith, mythology, "fantomology,"to mention the most prominent onesin Solaris) appear to be all explaining and mutually exclusie from withinthose structures. 2rom the standpoint of contemporary culture as a whole,they appear to be parts that, when ideally combined, come closer toarticulating the truth about reality than any single one of them. This iew

implies that human cognition operates by maintaining a great ariety ofpossible techniues for world-describing $and the possibility of synthesesamong these), some of which are certainly expected to assimilate whateerreality has in store. %ll such priileged models of explanation are based onthe positie faith that truth exists "outside" consciousness and must beappropriated by it. 6hen confronted by a concrete existing thing that resistsall strategies of appropriation, the common character of these strategiescomes out in relief: all are pro3ections of human ualities, as if they couldexist outside human limits.

9f course, em cannot create a truly alien creature to mae us see this

paradox from outside human consciousness. Though he taes great pains toeoe the sense of olaris's strangeness through iidly detailed, and yetbarely intelligible, descriptions of the planet and its excrescences, we alwayssee the planet through a human obserer's language as it stries toassimilate an a priori nonassimilable ob3ect. 9ur only eidence that there is atruly alien intelligence is that all the intrahuman distinctions between modesof thought and types of discourse either disappear $as in =elin's strangeloe story) or, when they retain their distinctieness, they become absurdanachronisms, personified by artorius's pedantic deotion to his positiisticideals and personal discipline. !n the face of that-which-does-not-correspond,the most dierse and contradictory ways of maing sense become a single

self-reflecting set of correspondences an amorphous mythoscience thrashingin its inability to articulate the alien.

em constructs this ironic "alienation" of cognition by at eery turn denyingthe olarists and readers the opportunity to complete the structure ofsignification that they were inited to expect by the text's allusions. em,and olaris, eoe certain structures particularly priileged in 6esternculture, only to distort them through other structures alien, and een


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inimical, to them. !n other words, hypotheses are made possible andpro3ected by modes of thought that contradict those hypotheses. !n this way,the failure of the positie science of olaristics $which already encompassesall the existing branches of science and has produced a multitude of newbranches by the time =elin arries on the station) to appropriate olaris

gradually leads the scientists to act as if the "olaris pro3ect" were thepro3ection of something more archaic $i.e., both older and more generatie)than science. %t one moment it is religious longing and messianism. =elindiscoers this iew fully elaborated in the writings of the olarist >untius,who had written that "olaristics is the space era's euialent of religion/faith disguised as science.... @xploration is a liturgy using the language ofmethodology/ the drudgery of the olarists is carried out only in theexpectation of fulfillment, of an %nnunciation, for there are not and cannotbe any bridges between olaris and the @arth" $;;:;H5.

olaristics as messianism and as science may, howeer, be only a pro3ection

of erotic repression and narcissism, which founders when the olarists haeto confront their 2reudian ghosts, the repressed "others" inside themseles.now tells =elin:

6e thin of ourseles as =nights of the*oly 4ontact. This is another lie. 6e areonly seeing >an. 6e hae no need forother worlds. 6e need mirrors....6e aresearching for an ideal image of ourworld....%t the same time there issomething inside us which we don't

lie to face up to, from which we try toprotect ourseles, but which neerthelessremains, since we don't leae the @arthin primal innocence. $:H;)

ie the olarist commentators, we can go further. %ll these ideological andpsychological pro3ections may be the ineitable pro3ection of the physicaldefinition of the human body onto the unierse. o the eccentric olaristArastrom speculates in discerning the anthropomorphisms "in the euationsof the theory of relatiity, the theorem of magnetic fields, and the ariousunified field theories" $;; :;H). The ideal systems of reason come gradually

to be seen as ersions of human limitation disguised as transcendence.em's olarists, all men of science and hard common sense, are compelledto entertain an idea that necessarily casts grae doubts on the basis of theirlies as scientists: that there is no clear line between reason and unreason,reality and illusion.

". #ecause readers of $olaris approach it as fiction, and expect thescience to be metaphorical, an educated reader cannot be as upset by the


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idea of science as a systemati+ed form of despair as the olarists are. Theliterary form offers a ind of comfort, deriing from the sense that the story'sorder is distinct from that of the ideas it "uses." %nd since these ideas aretransformed by fiction into metaphors at the outset, the reader already startsout expecting some of the collapse of uasi-rationalistic systems into one

another that the professional scientists of the tale experience in the action.%s the possibility of a realistic interpretation of Solaris dissoles for thereader, and the scientists themseles seem to turn to religious andpsychoanalytic explanations, the reader loos for clues of more traditionalmythic structures. em proides such clues abundantly in arious inds ofallusions: in names, situations, and explicit speculations. But these mythicstructures, too, are sub3ect to the noel's underlying indeterminacy. Theyalso suffer the same mutual deformation and incongruous motiation as theuasi-rationalistic explanatory models.

The whole olarist enterprise seems trapped in a >yth of the 6ill1a myth

designed to explain and support humanity's appropriation of the materialunierse. This myth appears gross and absurd when confronted by amanifestly more powerful alien being. !nto this stalemate come the ?isitors,whom em clearly identifies with >yths of oe. %lthough we neer learnwho now's and artorius's ?isitors are, we can infer from Aibarian's %fricanwoman and from 7heya, as well as from some of now's guarded comments,that all the ?isitors are incarnations of repressed ob3ects of erotic desire. Thesituation implies that the olarists hae drawn their power to explore andtheir loe of adenture from this repression, and that the shoc of seeingtheir shadow-seles so concretely in front of them saps their egoistic resole.The ironic exception is artorius. *is sadistic hatred of the ?isitors, and the

unbending scientific egoism associated with it, is sufficient sustain him untilhe succeeds in inenting the neutrino annihilator that "ills" the simulacra.6hile =elin, and to a lesser degree now, come to accept the ?isitors' andolaris's right to be real, artorius's whole existence is predicated on thedestruction of eerything that interferes with his positie ego-science.

7heya in particular seems to carry the alues of nonscientific mythic-religious mediation, albeit in a way that deforms distinct mythic structures ofmediation by conflating them. 7heya gradually taes on the role for =elin ofa personal mediator sent to him for inscrutable reasons by a deificintelligence. he offers him the opportunity to redeem the guilt and shame of

his life with the original 7heya, an absolution of the 9ld =elin, a &itanuo&a. But the exact alue of 7heya's mythic-religious characterin Solaris depends on how we interpret =elin's decision to stay by the planetat the end of the noel.

7heya begins as a mere embodiment of =elin's erotic desire. he seems liean indestructible goddess attached to a mortal loer. *er physical structureappears to be so stable that she might neer grow old. *er anomalous


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neutrino-based body, howeer, maes it doubtful that she could remainstable away from her heaenly abode near olaris. These associations arenot lost on now, who refers to 7heya once as a "fair %phrodite, child of9cean" $;&:;(&), much to =elin's annoyance1although he himself hadearlier called Aibarian's ?isitor "a monstrous %phrodite" $:). %s 7heya

becomes increasingly human in her feelings and uandaries, the character ofher loe appears to change also. !t gradually becomes less arbitrary,clinging, and childlie, and increasingly faithful and altruistic. he becomes adoubly inerted, paradoxical image of 4hrist, a materialistic ersion of thetranscendental mediator. he is a human form of olaris, and a olarian formof the human. %s she mysteriously eoles into a conscious, free agent,again and again acting against her physical limits $by drining the liuidoxygen, eeping her distance from =elin, and lying about listening toAibarian's cassette J(:;8K), she fulfills1em implies1essential cognitie,axiological, and ontological conditions of being human. he is conscious ofher ignorance of her origins/ she is willing to sacrifice her life for a loed one/

and she is, in the end, able to die. The goddess freely chooses to acceptdeath to liberate =elin from his guilt. ince artorius and now will not beswayed from their determination to annihilate the ?isitors, they hae theforce of fate for 7heya. *er acceptance of death re_enacts the tragic graceof 4hrist's passion on olaris tation.

*oweer, 7heya can only recapitulate the myth of 4hrist if the whole mythicstructure of 4hrist's mediation is complete in =elin's life. *er death maessense as a uasi_religious mediation only if =elin at the end has beenemancipated from his egoism and the burden of his past sins into a conditionof new hope. 7heya's act would then imply a ersion of transcendental

grace, alidating the religion of 4ontact and affirming the "personal"relationship between the godlie olaris and the human =elin. But if, with#arrinder, we iew =elin as a man stuc in the hall of mirrors of narcissisticself-reflection, then the character of 7heya's mediation changes fromemancipatory to ironic. !nstead of 4hrist, she becomes @cho, the loeliestand most concrete of =elin's fated self-reflections. %lthough she is the onlyone of his echoes capable of loing 0arcissus, her loe can do nothing tosae him from drowning in the unfathomable ocean-pool whose surfacereflects his face throughout the cosmos. These two mythic structures areinimical to each other. % myth cannot simultaneously alidate transcendentalgrace and transcendental fatedness. %nd yet we cannot discard either

structure in reading Solaris.

The paradoxes of interpretation stem not only from the way theseincompatible myths associated with 7heya are shaded into one another. Thereader is also depried of ways to determine the ontological status of themyths and mythic beings. The realistic ontology of the tale seems fixed. 6eare neer led to entertain magical or mythical explanations literally. The roleof the mythic is neer emphasi+ed in Solaris. !ts presence seems only to


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represent the natural tendency of people to create structures of explanationeen when empirical and rationalistic conditions for one cannot be met. >yththen is an explanation of something that does not cease to be consideredmysterious as a result of that explanation. 7heya's physical existence can beexplained in materialistic terms: as a "form" taen from a "psychic tumor" in

=elin's cerebrosides, as a neutrino based anthropomimetic structure, as an"instrument" of olaris. !n a sense, then, her supernatural character ismerely a particularly ob3ectie pro3ection of unconscious human $andolarianG) needs. The mythology she eoes is closer to 2reud's and2euerbach's than to Aolgotha's and %ttica's. But, as usual in Solaris, thematerialistic explanation leads only to its own limits and to the necessity ofinferring a form inconceiable in materialistic terms. The familiar form of the?isitors, =elin tells his colleagues, is only a camouflage: "the real structure,which determines the functions of the ?isitors, remains concealed" $:;;;).olarists can determine that the planet is composed of atoms. *ow it canproduce a human being formed from neutrinos is beyond the comprehension

of olaristics.

%. In Solaris, &em built into his design both of the literary "systems ofindeterminacy" he discusses in his ">etafantasia"1hermetic ambiguity andmutual distortion of structures1to represent the cultural implications of thecontemporary cognitie paradoxes. @ach "system" is an actual, culturallysanctioned ideological interpretation of those implications. *ermeticambiguity implies that there are possible resolutions/ but, in =afa's words,they are "not for us. " 9pposed to this inerted transcendentalist model, themutual deformation of narratie structures attempts to reflect the iew thathuman consciousness and nature are immanently "impure," indefinite

processes. em does not opt for one or the other of these radical solutions.*e is essentially a realist. *e adopts his clashing paradigms from the actualhistorical eolution of 6estern culture, which has proen to be a more exactprototype for his drama of cogni+ance than more sub3ectie models mighthae been. !t embodies, by definition, the strictest determinism $it hasalready happened) and the most complete openness $we can neer besure $hat happened, because it is not oer). Cust as olaristics includesidealistic hypotheses that the planet is an "imperfect god" or "ocean yogi,"materialistic hypotheses that it is a "plasmic mechanism," and syntheses,lie the "homeostatic ocean" theory, a true image of indeterminacy inreading includes both the uasi-transcendentalist and uasi-immanentist

paradigms of uncertainty1each of which re_enacts prescientific ideologies inthe language of science. Solaris cannot be made intelligible from only one ofthese mutually contradictory perspecties. Both olaris and Solaris are theproduct of integrating certain clues into structures that cannot remain stableand closed: since myth and science, metaphor and realistic mimesis,motiate one another, no priileged way of reading emerges. 6hether=elin, the representatie of human culture, is on the erge of "widening JaKconceptual framewor" as Bohr hoped the science of the future would, or on


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the erge of an unbridgeable gulf between human culture and the unierse,we cannot now. em leaes his readers at the station where he beliees the&5th century's uantum-olarists arried 3ust before them.

09T@

;. em's collected critical wors aailable in @nglish are scheduled to bepublished in ;(HD by *arcourt Brace Coanoich, under thetitle icro$orlds, edited by 2ran+ 7ottensteiner.

&. @nglish-language commentaries on em include 7ose $pp. H&_(D), uin$in Solaris, pp. &;&_&), =etterer $pp. ;H&_&5&), and #otts.

. To aoid confusion, ! will use the @nglish translators' ersions, now and7heya, for em's #olish originals, naut and *arey.

8. !n the original #olish ersion, em names =elin's wife and ?isitors "*arey." The @nglish translators' decision to rename her "7heya" stries me as aninspired improement oer the original. The lining of this ambiguousmediator with the @arth goddess reinforces and intensifies the irony of=elin's decision not to return to the @arth.

D. The reader who tries to piece Solaris together from apparent allusions is infor a hard time. Eoes the noel's 2echner, the first explorer to die on olarisand the possible source of the gigantic child witnessed by his colleagueBerton, hint at the great Aerman psychophysicist, Austa Theodor 2echner,who was eually well nown for his "hard" wor in psychological

uantification and his theosophical speculations on the angelic nature ofplanetsG !s %ndre Berton a distorted allusion to the manifester of urrealismGhould =elin be associated with ord =elin and the only absolute currentlyaailable to scienceG !s there significance in the names of the spaceshipsmentioned by =elin, and in their order of appearance: the glorious asceticresole of the Prometheus followed by the Ulysses' connotations of cunningand homesicness, which is then followed by the Laacoon's passie sufferingfor misreading the gods, and finally theAlaric's purely destructie power ofconuestG These and many other names seem to call out for interpretation,but we cannot be sure that they are not arbitrary. $!n correspondence, emclaims that all the names in the noel came to him unconsciously, with the

exception of artorius, who is named for a tiny muscle.)

. The concluding chapter of the boo has appeared in @nglish as">etafantasia: The #ossibilities of cience 2iction" $see "6ors 4ited").

. !n his Summa "echnolo!iae, em gies this name to the study of artificialrealities "that are in no way distinguishable from normal reality by the


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intelligent beings that lie in them, but which nonetheless obey rulesdeiating from that normal reality" (Summa, 8:;;).

697= 4!T@E

%rendt, *annah. et$een Past and uture $0odern cience 2iction" -adical Science ournal, no. 8 $;(), pp. -;.

#otts, tephen C. "Eialogues 4oncerning *uman Nnderstanding: @mpirical?iews of Aod from oce to em," in rid!es to Science iction, ed. Aeorgelusser $4arbondale, !.: ;(().

7ose, >ar.Alien /ncounters. $4ambridge, >%: ;(H;).

uin, Earo. "The 9pen-@nded #arables of tanislaw em and Solaris% inem's Solaris, ed. cit., pp. &;&-&.

lem's solaris: certain and uncertain readings

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