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Article Excerpt
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay describes Stanislaw Lem's fiction as "metacommentary," indicating the significance of human cultural constructions such as science, myth, literature, religion, and so on, in his novels. These constructions, which intend to explain the universe, diffuse into various, contradictory theories and create a flux of ideas without final resolution or reconciliation. Csicsery-Ronay argues that "[s]ince neither Lem's protagonists nor his readers ever arrive at an Archimedean point outside the totality they are trying to understand, no one system of commentary is ever sufficient. It is the play of commentary that creates Lem's universe" ("How not to" 387, emphasis in original). (1) In Foucaldian terms, the texts indicate the multiplicity of discourses, "discontinuous practices, which cross each other, are sometimes juxtaposed with one another, but can just as well exclude or be unaware of each other" ("The Order" 67). (2) Based on Csicsery-Ronay's analysis and utilizing Michel Foucault's and Friedrich Nietzsche's theories, I interpret Lem's Solaris (1961) as meta-science fiction and meta-science-fiction. (3)
The validity and "truth" of scientific explanations depend on the discipline or paradigm that created them. Foucault's disciplines open the discourse, but also confine it with a prescribed "set of methods, a corpus of propositions considered to be true, a play of rules and definitions of techniques and instruments" ("The Order" 59). Thomas S. Kuhn's paradigms follow and contradict each other, providing theories with certain freedom, but also constraining the scientific perspective: "one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will admit as scientific or encourage its members to undertake" (Kuhn 37). Strict conditions given by paradigms prove to the postmodern reader that "scientific revolutions," the substitution or succession of paradigms do not necessarily mean progress, but draw attention to problems in the history of science. As Kuhn argues, "[w]hen it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm has been embodied ... the member of a mature scientific community is, [therefore], like the typical character of Orwell's 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be" (166).
The planet Solaris with its unapproachable, giant alien life form demonstrates that earthly and anthropomorphic human science cannot provide accurate descriptions of an alien phenomenon (see Csicsery-Ronay, "The Book is" 7 and Freedman 108). Solaris resembles The Science of Discworld (1999), which illustrates that the sciences (or at least our notions of them) and the narrative logic ("narrative imperative") of stories are not entirely different. "When you live in a complex world, you have to simplify it in order to understand it" (Pratchett 42)--it may be fruitful to analyze these simplifications, explanatory stories and lies-to-children both in the sciences and in the humanities.
It is virtually a truism that science fiction (sf) describes the relationship of self and the Other. Gary K. Wolfe's "icons" are mediating devices between order and chaos, self and the Other, natural and artificial, human and alien; they are mythical images "of the barrier between known and unknown" (Wolfe xiv). Lem's Solaris and Return from the Stars (1961) evoke these dichotomies and make them problematic; as Mark Rose argues, Solaris is "a highly selfconscious fiction that is as much a work of generic criticism as it is a new text in the genre" (82). When Lem's novels use "icons" of sf, such as the space ship, space travel, exploration, and so on, they also criticize them, comparing them to crusades, colonialism, and mirrors. (4)
Possibly the most quoted passage of Solaris can plausibly be read as an allusion to and criticism of positivist science and sf: "We take off into cosmos, ready for everything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors"(72).
Solaris as meta-science
Creating names and special terms that draw on and modify the conventions of language is an essential process of the scientific method. The character Snow in Solar is points out that "[w]e have named all the stars and all the planets, even though they might already have had names of their own" (184). Scientific language, like language as such, originates from the human intellect. As the narrator of Solar is argues, naming gives way "to the temptations of a latent anthropomorphism or zoomorphism" (116), or at least, in case of cautious Solarists, of "geocentrism" (111). In other words, language inevitably humanizes the world with its tropes and anthropomorphisms.
When Foucault underlines the significance of metaphors in the language of disciplines ("The Order" 60), he draws on medical science as an example, which has been analyzing madness for centuries. The language of madness can be interpreted as an alternate language to that of reason, and is, therefore, forced to remain mute and unheard: "[t]his whole immense discourse of the madman was taken for mere noise" ("The Order" 53). In Solaris, the messages of the planet are also unheard, "described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it" (121).
In His Master's Voice (1968), insanity and undecipherable noise are once more interrelated, as the novel indicates that often a seemingly insane theory comes up with a revolutionary solution. In the novel, only a crackpot idea can assume that there is a message in the neutrino emission coming from space: a "stream of information--human speech, for example--does not always tell us that it is information and not a chaos of sounds. Often we receive a foreign language as complete babble" (40).
Historically, the language of the madman has also been attributed with strange powers, with "the power of uttering a hidden truth, of telling the future, of seeing in all naivety what the others cannot perceive" (Foucault, "The Order" 53). In Lem's Solaris, the speech of the Other implies mythical and religious discourses: "there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi,' a sage, a symbol of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence" (24). Silencing the other and enhancing it with a mythical omniscience and omnipotence are interrelated phenomena. Science and religion have a common origin and a similar purpose when they intend to explain the alien: where science ends, religion begins. A theoretician in the novel points...
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