Solaris—Stanislaw Lem

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Maltese gold piece honoring Solaris and Lem, issued in 2023

Literary canons contain a small handful of utopian or dystopian novels set on a foreseeable Earth, but they don’t usually include science fiction set on other planets. Admittedly, Harold Bloom’s stab at compiling a literary canon does contain Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, but my Decade list doesn’t even have that.

Hardly any genre fiction ever breaks into the classics club either, but great writers do sometimes toy with a genre such as mystery or romance and create a timeless masterpiece. However, science fiction seems unlikely to rise out of the ghetto of unserious fiction. Why, then, do so many people let Solaris into the exclusive Club Canon?

Bloom has this to say about what makes a work canonical.

When you read a canonical work for the first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations. Read freshly, all that The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Faust Part Two, Hadji Murad, Peer Gynt, Ulysses, and Canto general have in common is their uncanniness, their ability to make you feel strange at home.

I think he gets it right. Canonical works defy our expectations and confront us with a certain uncanniness. Most genre fiction falls short of this standard. Anyone who reads genre fiction has very clear expectations, and woe to the writer who ignores them. Publishers like to pigeonhole everything they publish so their marketing department will know how to advertise it. When outsiders try their hands at such fiction and try to up the standards, they usually disappoint the audience and confuse the marketers.

Of all the genres, except for horror, you would expect science fiction to have the greatest potential for bringing its readers face to face with the uncanny, but it seems to me that it does the opposite. At the time Solaris came out (1961 in Polish, 1970 in English), sci-fi mostly embedded stereotyped human characters in nonhuman bodies and had them deliver banal dialogue in gosh-wow settings. An important shift toward more experimental and literary science fiction writing would soon take place, but Solaris appeared when the popular pulp sci-fi audience still expected bug-eyed monsters and ray guns. Solaris, in my opinion, accomplished the impossible by defying the sci-fi reader’s expectations and serving up a big dose of uncanniness disguised as triteness.

Solaris has three very different things going on: A juvenile plot, a satirical commentary on science and society, and some disturbing philosophical thought experiments. I think what Lem did with the thought experiments makes Solaris canonical, while the plot serves only to sell the book to nerdy kids.

Kris Kelvin relates the events surrounding his visit to the observatory station hovering above the surface of the planet, Solaris. When Kelvin arrives, he finds only two members of the crew. He has come to the station to work with his dissertation adviser, Dr. Gibarian, but learns that he died just recently. The man who meets him instead acts strangely and keeps making cryptic remarks that mostly irritate Kelvin—and me, too. A good chunk of the novel involves Kelvin trying to piece together what has happened there and what the other two plan to do in response. A lot of the novel consists of background information which we pick up as we read. It seems the planet Solaris has confounded scientists almost from its first discovery, over a hundred years before the novel begins. An oceanic being, unique in the known galaxy, covers almost its entire surface and somehow seems to live and think. Attempts to communicate with it or understand anything about it have yielded very few well-established answers.

The Plot. Kelvin quickly discovers that each of the crew has a “companion” somehow created by the ocean itself. Each companion seems to come from a painful memory its crew member has suppressed. We never learn the full stories of the rest of the crew, but Kelvin’s companion resembles his former girlfriend, Rheya, who committed suicide after they had an argument and broke up (other translations give her name as Harey or Hari). Kelvin got older, but, in his memory, Rheya remains twenty years old and beautiful. We never find out for sure why the ocean of Solaris has created these companions, but we do learn that Rheya cannot die and she cannot endure his absence for longer than a few minutes. In fact, if he locks her out of a room, she rips the door off its hinges. At first he thinks of her as a thing. Gradually, though, Kelvin begins to see her as human as she seems to acquire self-awareness and curiosity about her past. When she grasps the truth about herself she attempts suicide, but fails.

While Lem presents Kelvin’s relationship to Rheya as disturbed, guilt-ridden, and ethically dubious, this setup must surely have inspired countless teenage fantasies: A manly man on a nearly empty space station, with a perpetually young female companion, whose entire existence revolves around him, with whom he can do anything he wishes and face no consequences. In all fairness to Lem, the book contains no overtly sexual content. When Kelvin describes his pillow-talk with the indestructible doll, he never does more than advance the plot. Nevertheless, the setup must have appealed to an audience of teenage boys in the 1960s. In the 2020s, however, I find the book’s male gaze pretty offensive. But I suppose Solaris has the good company of several other canonical works.

The Satire of Science and Society. Lem uses Kelvin’s research to tell readers all about humanity’s exploration of Solaris. I enjoyed this fictional history more than the sciency details, but I imagine most readers at the time skipped over it. Lem must have had a blast coming up with all the names of scientists, papers, and theories.

In the century or so between Solaris’s discovery and the star of the novel, interest in the mysterious planet waxed and waned as people put forward every imaginable theory about it. A branch of science called Solaristics emerged. New religions sprang up and old ones struggled to incorporate latest information about the planet-size life form. The popular press never seemed to grasp the complexity of the research, and instead turned to oversimplifications that might excite public interest. Politics played a role in what types of studies would or would not receive funding. In short, the shenanigans of interest groups back on Earth played a greater role in the ebb and flow of Solaristics than did any questions about the nature of life and consciousness.

The Thought Experiments. I suspect that Solaris earned a place in the canon because of two philosophical issues it puts to the reader. I think of these issues as thought experiments. The first thought experiment deals with the limits of communication. When humans stumbled upon Solaris, they found another intelligence, but one so vastly different from themselves that the two life forms could not possibly have any shared experiences. This Solaristic intelligence has no sense of sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. Humans want to understand Solaris’s ocean, and the ocean seems to want to understand humans, but how could either one leap across the chasm that separates them?

A science fiction reader would expect the cliché of telepathy would solve the problem. But telepathy depends on two minds sharing something. Like what? Words? Maybe, but in what language? Would the ocean of Solaris somehow speak English? Of course not. What if telepathy involved sharing the meaning of words, rather than the words themselves? “Schnee ist weiss” and “Snow is white” express the same proposition (mean the same “thing”) in two different languages. So maybe the alien could telepathically convey languageless propositions. Could a being that never experienced snow or color even conceive of the whiteness of snow? Ultimately, almost every shareable thought humans have relies on experiences derived from human senses. In fact, humanity’s efforts to communicate with Solaris’s ocean has met with one failure after another. No one has yet found the equivalent of a Rosetta stone, and presumably no one ever would. That failure at the heart of the novel constitutes a major breach of genre expectations.

Second, Lem has set up a thought experiment to explore the mind/body problem. In zombie movies, people die and get reanimated but they have lost their human personalities. They do not act like real persons. In recent philosophy, the term “philosophical zombie” refers to a simulacrum that perfectly mimics a human being, possibly even at the molecular level. Its fake cells mimic the actions of real cells. Its fake brain functions exactly as a real brain functions. It behaves exactly as a conscious human would behave in every circumstance. However, it differs from real humans in that it lacks consciousness. It has no subjective experiences, no interiority, no awareness, even if it insists otherwise. Philosophers exploring the mind/body problem raise the question of whether a philosophical zombie could exist at all, or would having a functioning brain somehow necessitate its having a mind?

Rheya comes close to fitting the description of a philosophical zombie. Although not a molecule-for-molecule copy of a specific real person, she nevertheless imitates cellular life forms and she strongly resembles someone from Kelvin’s tortured memory. Rheya creeps Kelvin out at first, when he thinks of her as nothing more than a simulacrum. But he eventually begins to think of her as fully human and begins to love her as he had once loved his girlfriend. He becomes protective of her, and because she will fade away and die if ever she leaves Solaris, he even plans to stay on the station permanently.

Kelvin’s relationship to Rheya forces the reader to confront the uncanny. An omniscient narrator would let us know right away if Rheya has an interior life. Lem won’t answer that question. Instead, he has narrated the entire novel in first-person form, from Kelvin’s point of view. Kelvin has no direct insight into the working of anyone else’s mind. Rheya could have self-awareness or not. One could say the same of the other two crew members, or of Solaris’s ocean itself. The ocean has behaviors—it reproduces human artifacts, for instance—but humans can only speculate about their meaning or purpose. The companions that torment the other crew members remain unknown to the reader. The other crew members hatch a plot between themselves and don’t let Kelvin in on it. The dead crew member left notes explaining a few things, but nothing about his own companion.

Because of Kelvin’s isolation, I began to feel very much alone. And Lem, that clever devil, didn’t write in third-person limited, revealing only Kelvin’s thoughts. No, I only have Kelvin’s words, not his thoughts or feelings. Kelvin does a nice job of describing his subjective life, but I don’t know if I trust his use of the pronoun “I” any more than I trust ChatGPT’s use of it. I have no more reason to trust Kelvin’s subjective account than I have to believe Rheya’s tears.

Because of all the above, I reluctantly agree that Solaris belongs in the Western canon, albeit as a rather shabby guest. It has many other faults I haven’t dwelt on, such as the anachronisms. The crew call each other on telephones that apparently have cords; Kelvin secretly records on tape what goes on in his room while he sleeps; the station’s library has shelves full of books, some of them leather-bound; Kelvin describes something spinning like a phonograph record. Honestly, I so often had to pretend Kelvin says things differently than he does that reading Solaris felt a lot like watching Godard’s Alphaville, where I have to pretend that a Ford Mustang is a space ship.

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Here I go again, apologizing for taking so long between Decade posts. Sorry. I can’t seem to work any faster these days. I next want to tackle Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Everyone reads Madame Bovary, but this one seems at least as important, even if not as popular. I’ll use the English translation by Raymond N. MacKenzie.

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Works mentioned in this reflection:

Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem (the Kilmartin and Cox translation)

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, by Harold Bloom

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri

Paradise Lost, by John Milton

Faust Part Two, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Hadji Murad, by Leo Tolstoy

Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen

Ulysses, by James Joyce

Canto general, by Pablo Nerudo

Alphaville (1965), directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man, by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners, by Gustave Flaubert