Solaris Three: The mediality of Enns criticized

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics, including evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry relates to a different topic.

My current research interest is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis and which I can share.

Today's topic: A Paper by Enns

I will be criticizing a paper by Anthony Enns (citation below), but first I want to come to his defense. In short, his work is more in the mainstream of Lem criticism, and my ideas are outliers. He has done his homework of reviewing and referencing the rest of the corpus of Lem criticism. He has read at least some of Lem's other fiction, which I have not. Enns quotes Lem's non-fiction statements about literature in general and about Solaris in particular. By criticizing Enns, I do not mean to say that his ideas are without merit.

My problem with his essay is that he understands the alien contact in the novel to be merely a way "to illustrate the various effects produced by competing media technologies ..." (34). To me, that seems like small beer. Admittedly, he does come from a tradition of communication studies that puts high importance on how we communicate. I think that school is adjacent to philosophical schools that hold that humans think in verbal languages. (Steven Pinker would argue otherwise.) If you think that the human soul is merely a form of communication, then media technologies are very important indeed.

To counter this school, I would like to point out that the novel's 'visitors' are embodiments of persons about whom the novel's characters had feelings of deep guilt. I would say that a psychoanalytical interpretation of the novel would be more plausible than a communication technology interpretation: each man on board the space station has to face his own worst shame. The novel hints that in each case the shame is either directly or indirectly related to sexual feelings. Up against that sort of observation, competing media technologies seems not central to the meaning of the novel. I am not a fan of Freud, but Sigmund with his beard and pipe could do better than a media critic.

Enns would rebut the above point because he follows the ideas of Friedrich Kittler and Laurence Rickels, to wit, the storage of data in media technology is similar to the Freudian unconscious, so the media interpretation and the Freudian interpretation are one and the same. Again, I think that this position sells the human mind short. Mourning the loss of a loved one is not just putting an old favorite album on the turntable. Enns associates mediality (writings discussing other media technology) with the human act of mourning and its associated melancholy, hence the title of the article. Again, that is insulting to the human experience.

Recap: In Solaris, the quasi-alive ocean creates the book's "visitors" in order to interact with the humans on the space station. Kelvin is the main character of the novel. His visitor appears in the guise of his deceased wife Rheya, who was driven to suicide by his desire to break up with her.

Enns argues that because the visitors exhibit some qualities similar to phonographic recordings or videos on film, the visitors represent media technology. I do admit that the visitors do have some similarities to cinema projections. In this way, Enns is correct.

Enns states: "Because Rheya's appearance represents a manifestation of Kelvin's unconscious thoughts and emotions, and because the visitors are repeatedly associated with the technology of film and are described as immaterial filmic projections, it is clear that Kelvin's melancholia is a product of conditions of mediality." (45)

First, Rheya is only a manifestation of Kelvin's unconscious thoughts because the ocean has probed his mind and extracted those thoughts. She is a projection that the ocean has created for a purpose. She is a creation of an entity that possesses intentionality, not some abstract concept of mediality. This invalidates the premise of Enns' logical inference that "because of this, it is clear that that."

Second, I admit that it is true that Kelvin carries inner guilt over the death of his wife and that the appearance of the visitor does seem to trigger depression. However, it is not clear that his depression is a product of the conditions of media technology, whatever that means. Instead, the ocean seems to be creating a particular visitor for each human. Each visitor is in a form that has strong emotional resonance for that human and exists as a way for the ocean to try to build an emotional bond with that human. To the degree that Kelvin suffers melancholy, it is the product of the ocean's efforts to connect with him. Enns confuses the medium with the intentions of the message's sender. The cause is the intention of the ocean, not the conditions of mediality.

The same critique of the thesis by Enns can be made for the second novel studied in his paper, the novel His Master's Voice. Enns claims that the obsession with death in the novel relates to the problem of understanding the medium of the message. He sums up his ideas by saying that media technology such as film and phonographs preserve the original impressions of the person who has died, thereby prolonging mourning, while the print media of the novel is written by someone who wants to end the mourning. It is print versus technology. (Nevermind that print is a technology.)

A more straightforward interpretation is that the message might really be from the dying universe, an almost supernatural message, and it evokes in Hogarth thoughts of losses he has experienced and his own mortality. Enns' thesis continues to feel small next to the profound mysteries offered by both novels. He says that both novels "reveal an essential connection between the dimension of ghosts and alien communication" (50), but I would say that they reveal a connection between the ghosts and each novel's mysterious and almost supernatural Other. The communication medium might be itself a bit mysterious, but that pales next to the mysteriousness of the sender of the messages.

Footnote: Despite my criticism of Enns' thesis about mediality and mourning, I do have to mention a development in this exact field. I am talking about griefbots, or deadbots. The magazine Science News reports that two tech companies now offer services whereby artificial intelligence can be used to create virtual bots which allow the living to interact with digital replicas of the dead. In theory, a virtual bot of your deceased loved one might help with the grieving process, but ethicists are calling for guidelines to prevent abuse. The article is at Should we use AI to resurrect digital 'ghosts' of the dead? by Kathryn Hulick. This is mourning and mediality with a vengeance!

Enns, Anthony. (2002). "Mediality and Mourning in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris and His Master's Voice." Science Fiction Studies, (29): 34-52.

WorldCat Reviews hit 100, plus, a book review: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders

Back in December of 2022, I posted here a statement that I would create a webpage containing my book reviews that had been posted to WorldCat. At the time that they discontinued hosting book reviews, I had about 250 on the site.

I have been slow to migrate those old reviews to the new webpage because I want to edit them, correct spelling and grammar errors, etc. It is possible that some were marginal enough that I will never repost them. I have also been adding new reviews that were never on WorldCat. The new webpage now has over one hundred reviews. It is, as always, at: A Collection of Book Reviews Originally Written for WorldCat.

Below is a new review that I wrote this spring and which is on the revised webpage.

Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In which four Russians give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. New York : Random House, 2021.

This book purports to be a master class given by four Russians on "writing, reading, and life." One thing that George Saunders does in the book is explain how he himself goes about writing a short story. He also offers close analyses of seven Russian short stories from the late 19th century, a time which was a high point of Russian liberal culture. In the process, he presents his own vision for the value of literature in general. He uses as a pretended conceit that the Russians are teaching the class, which they are not. Although Saunders strenuously rejects the idea that he is writing a "how to" manual for writers, the overarching theme of the book is a "how to," or rather, "this is how I did it, here are the principles that I think are important, and you can figure out your own way."

Saunders agrees with George Eliot, Jamil Zaki, and others that the purpose of literature is to expand our empathy to all people. These 19th century Russian short stories are fairly domestic, but he argues that they are part of a resistance literature which defends the (liberal) ideal that everyone is worthy of attention. He states that readers are a vast underground network for good in the world. Reading makes them more expansive, generous people.

Ironically, Saunders almost immediately contradicts his own vision just stated that literature makes us better people. He notes that the Nazis were skilled at using pageantry to promote their values, and he admits that art can have a dangerous propaganda value. I agree with his latter position that art can be dangerous, but I would frame it to say that literature plays a role in establishing cultural norms. It gets you to connect to a culture through your emotions. For example, Dante's Divine Comedy helped define what it was to be an Italian in the medieval era.

Saunders' own vision--that literature is a force of good in the world and makes us better people--is itself a cultural norm. His writings promote a number of cultural norms. To take one aspect of his writing as an example, the sexual norms in his fiction would not be welcome in more restrictive societies. I would not call his stories especially raunchy, but his books would not be shelved in the Amish fiction section. (I grew up in an area that was heavily Amish and Mennonite. I have been told, but might have the details wrong, that the public library there recently had a specific aisle for Amish fiction. Amish and Mennonite women were forbidden by their communities from checking out fiction that was not from that aisle.)

Saunders is in the delicate position of being a white male in an academic culture that, on average, skews to the left on political and social issues--a culture that sometimes casts a jaundiced eye on white males. He is holding up the work of these dead white males as Great Literature at a time when many adherents of Critical Theory argue that that is wrong. As I interpret it, critical theory argues that we should have a post-colonial and post-defined-sexuality and post-science (antiphysis) and post-religious attitude toward viewing the world in general and literature in particular. Praising the Great Writers is not part of the programme.

Saunders sees literature as asking big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What are we supposed to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth anyway? Why read literature? Saunders argues that the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world. It can deceive us, but it can be trained to accuracy.

This is a vision of literature as universalistic. On the one hand, some theologians might argue that these questions should be left to religion. On the other hand, some critical theorists see this sort of universal position as propping up a privileged group. They ask: who is being held up as the universal man? Saunders gives a nod to critical theory by arguing that Chekhov structured his stories, such as "Gooseberries," so that pronouncements and positions are destabilized. "Destabilized" is a good term in critical theory; it is almost as good as terms such as defamiliarize or de-reify. By presenting his ideas as "just my way of doing it," and focusing on techniques for writing rather than criteria for what counts as Great Literature, Saunders dodges the thrust of critical theory.

In one instance, though, Saunders makes a rather strange and questionable argument that sexism and discrimination based on social class can be translated into bad technique. According to this perspective, if Tolstoy hadn't been so blindly privileged in his attitudes towards the peasants, his stories would have been better. Saunders can then say, hey, it's not all about race, class, and gender; it can be reduced to an argument about good technique and bad technique. You can still enjoy the dead white males who had good technique and therefore had good universalistic values.

By focusing on the Russian writers of the 19th century, Saunders may be setting up a lesson about the excesses of revolutionary culture. Today's critical theory is related to Marxism, and, as Saunders points out, what destroyed all those sensitive readers of the Russian Renaissance were the Bolsheviks--Marxists who took them out and shot them. Saunders doesn't name current critical theorists, but one might infer that this aside is a cautionary tale.

On the surface, Saunders focuses on techniques, such as "maintain specificity," "always be escalating," etc., but he sneaks in praise for the sensitivity and understanding of these writers he showcases. Chekhov was wise about loneliness. Gogol was wise about the role of language in constructing our inner world. This is a book that praises the wisdom and universalist ideals of the Great Masters, even if it slips those assessments in under the guise of a technical discussion.

In his own writing process, Saunders starts with any idea, then subjects his current draft to intensive revision. To him, this technique allows his unconscious sense of the story to come out through a thousand micro-decisions. He just follows the inner voice and lets it take him where it wants to go. He does not like the idea of mapping out a plot; rather, a story creates questions which need to be resolved. When he began as a writer, he wanted to write in a spare, realist style like Hemingway, but he discovered that his most effective writing was in a comic, absurdist style. His advice: find your most effective style, even if it is not what you hoped it would be.

Saunders argues that you need to get people to want to read your work. It has to be interesting enough sentence by sentence for them to keeping reading and satisfying enough in the end for them to start the next story. This vision suggests that the art should follow the reader rather than the reader follow the art, and it seems to encourage the would-be writer to chase after the tastes of the broadest audiences, whether they were the readers of pulp fiction a century ago or the followers of click-bait today.

Of course, readers who follow cultural leaders are more inclined to read what those leaders promote, and in that way, the art can lead the reader. Saunders leads us to these wise Russians. The editors at The New Yorker led their readers to Saunders. As for myself, I would never have read The Friends of Eddie Coyle by Higgins if it had not been suggested by someone whose opinions I respect.

At the end of the book, Saunders humorously disavows that his advice is authoritative. What he seems to be saying is: "This is how I do it, ... just sayin'. ... But I am successful and well-respected, and I learned at the hands of other successful and respected writers such as Tobias Wolff. Just sayin'." He insists that his entire book be bracketed by the words, "According to George." In this way, he can influence the reading public and preserve traditional aesthetic values without appearing to impose them and without being skewered by those who reject the canon.

I like the book. That having been said, I will destabilize my judgment by pointing out that Saunders needed an editor to cut the length. He doesn't give one metaphor for the writing process, he gives dozens. If I had been reading instead of listening to the e-audiobook version, I might have been more frustrated by the repetition ad nauseum. Take your own advice, man: always be escalating!

Solaris Two: Tomes in space!

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics. This blog entry relates to a different topic.

My current research interest is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis and which I can share.

Today's topic: book volumes with ink on paper.

Lem intersperses the action of the novel with discussions of the background of the planet. In order to add this background, the main character, Kris Kelvin, goes to the library to read up on the history of the exploration of Solaris. In the library, he hefts massive, print book volumes: ink on paper.

This novel was published in the early 1960s, and it features interstellar human space travel, anti-gravity devices, and other technologies that we have not mastered, but the Kindle was unimaginable. Instead, they were hauling bulky volumes across the galaxy. Lem did not anticipate massive storage capacity for electronic media. Even microfilm was available in 1960 and would have made more sense for schlepping a library across the universe. Stan just wasn't thinking.

Now, as a librarian, I for one enjoy using a paper book volume for reading for comprehension and notetaking. But our library downsized our bound periodicals collection by over half in part because many of the articles are full text online. The library on the Solaris station is a reference collection, not a set of books you would read from start to finish. A science fiction story written today about Solaris would have the station storing petabytes of raw data on the state of all parts of the ocean. The literature on the planet would fit on an app on everyone's phones. To the edge of the universe with massive paper books? I don't think so.

Solaris One: Artificial Intelligence from 1960

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics. This blog entry starts a new topic.

My current research interest is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis. These I will share.

In addition to his fiction, Lem published some non-fiction. A major work from the early 1960s, which was revised several times, is Summa Technologiae. I have felt the obligation to read this text to gain insights into Lem's conceptual framework when he wrote Solaris. I have now read (part of) the recent translation by Zylinska which was published by the University of Minnesota in 2013.

Summa Technologiae had almost nothing that furthered my own thesis, but I did notice a number of interesting details. I plan to have several blog entries about points I have discovered in this book.

Today's topic: Lem's understanding of computer science, or as it was called at that time, cybernetics. Lem, writing in the 1960s, seems to have an overly optimistic view of the ability of computer systems to display intelligence. That is, he is too optimistic about what we now call artificial intelligence. He doesn't understand that a major function of computers in the 1970s through today will be to keep track of records in database systems. Computer systems have not needed to be intelligent to accomplish such a role: information management does not require sophisticated computations, just efficient data retrieval.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, many computer theorists speculated that artificial intelligence would not be so computationally difficult. There is the famous story (possibly an urban legend) that the CIA at that time funded a Russian language translation system. They tested the system by inputting an English phrase for it to translate into Russian. Then they took the output and had it translate that back into English. The proverb, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," was translated into "The vodka is good, but the meat is bad." (Cue the rim shot.)

The recent advances in AI have only come about after great strides in machine learning and neural network designs. That, and an enormous increase in computing power. Reading what Lem wrote in 1960, I think, well, he was sixty years too early. Only products such as IBM's Watson, Google's AlphaGo, and OpenAI's GPT 4.0 have shown that computers are achieving something that might be called real intelligence.

An interesting sidetrack: the split between language smarts and mathematical smarts. The SAT test is famously divided between a verbal test and a mathematical test. In early 2024, the journal Nature reported on an AI system that is able to solve math competition problems better than many humans. Especially noteworthy is the fact that it is not a single system; it is two systems glued together. The first system is a language parser, which translates the verbal description of the problem into mathematical formulations. The second system then solves the math problem. Even among AI systems, the SAT test is split between verbal and mathematical skills.

Henri Bergson "Laughter" Review: Theory of Humor Series, part 28

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics, such as evolutionary literary criticism and the theory of humor. This being April Fools Day, I give you a post about humor. Enjoy.

In my investigation, I have read the following essay, and I will analyze it here.

Bergson, Henri. "Laughter" 1900. This essay can be found in many places.

(What self-respecting, or even self-denigrating, theorist of humor can go without commenting on the work of Henri Bergson? I mean, really!)

Bergson is usually included in the history of the theory of humor in part because he was in his day a well-respected philosopher, and not many philosophers have devoted some of their musings to humor. (One could say that humor is a-musing. Cue the rim-shot.) Bergson may also be popular in brief histories of the theory of humor because his theory is at times narrow. That narrowness makes it easy both to summarize and to criticize.

As a philosopher, Bergson heavily influenced Marcel Proust, so students of literature are more likely to read Bergson than to read other middling philosophers. (Bergson is no Plato.) Bergson's ideas are of especial interest to students of John Kennedy Toole because Proust influenced Evelyn Waugh, and Waugh in his turn influenced John Kennedy Toole.

Bergson begins his essay with a broad definition of humor which covers many cases and is similar to the theory that I have been using. (For my earlier blog entry summarizing my current theory of humor, click here.) However, Bergson, like any philosopher, then tries to fit all phenomena into his philosophical structure, and, in order to shoehorn humor into the framework, he has to narrow humor's scope. This narrower theory then obviously does not cover every possible case of humor, or even most cases. His theory starts out with promising validity across many instances of humor, but then it narrows and almost becomes a parody of itself. Despite its narrower form, for certain categories of humor, his theory hits the nail on the head (or on the thumb, as it were).

To put Bergson's ideas on humor into perspective, it helps to know something about the rest of his philosophy (though I am not an expert). He argues that human life is driven by a life-force, or a vitality. Mechanical devices lack vitality. Bergson wrote at a time when the industrial working conditions for the European proletariet were particularly brutal. It was at a time when Marx wrote that the worker was alienated from his own existence, and Bergson argued that the industrial existence of so many workers was being drained of vitality. Chaplin's movie Modern Times exemplifies this perspective.

In Bergson's system, humor is generated by envisioning a human being as a physical object without inner life or vitality. The man slipping on the banana peel ceases to be human and becomes merely a physical object, crashing to the ground. The person who goes through life acting robotically is ridiculous. (As Ionescu said, "If you want to turn tragedy into comedy, speed it up.") The ridicule and laughter are social cues to that person to correct his behavior; they signal to the person to stop operating like a robot on autopilot.

There are many aspects of this theory that work well. First, there is incongruity. The dichotomy between "human as a dignified personage" and "human as airborne object" often lead to competing linguistic scripts and incongruities. Second, there is disparagement. The physical human as object has less dignity than the person as a social actor in the abstract, and the sudden reminder of our physical nature has an aspect of belittlement. Third, there is a social function. The idea that laughter has a role to correct or modify behavior acknowledges humor's social functions.

However, it should be clear that many instances of humor do not fall into Bergson's narrow, mechanistic definition of what is funny (dry wit for example). Further, Bergson--convinced of the correctness of his entire philosophical system--insists that only this class of events are humorous. In a sense, his obsessive views themselves become comical. While his appeal to creativity and vitality are appealing--and his special class of events really are funny (just watch a Charlie Chaplin movie)--it is easy for even a two-bit critic like myself to refute his attempt at a comprehensive theory of humor.

Désolé Henri, pas de cigare!

Ignatius and Jay Gatsby: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 32

In The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick, has a low opinion of Jay Gatsby until he discovers that Gatsby is not amassing wealth and status for its own sake; rather, he is doing it in the quixotic pursuit of a woman. Suddenly, Nick finds Gatsby intriguing: "He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor."

Judith Saunders foregrounds this aspect of the novel in her essay on the evolutionary aspects of The Great Gatsby (citation below). Gatsby's wealth is a courtship display, much like the feathers of a peacock. Its purpose is to attract Daisy. For my earlier blog entry on Saunders' investigation, click here.

Naturally, when someone uses the word womb in a literary context, I think of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. That novel has more than one symbolic womb: Gus Levy is trapped in a womb from which he escapes, and, at the beginning of the novel, Ignatius Reilly enjoys occupying the womb of his mother's house and fights to stay there as she tries to eject him. Confederacy also features a relationship between Ignatius Reilly and Myrna Mynkoff that can be read as a carnivalesque parody of a stereotypical romance. Despite its ridiculous quality, could Ignatius's behavior in the novel be a courtship display, much as Gatsby's display of wealth?

In Confederacy, both Ignatius's Crusade for Moorish Dignity and his efforts to lead a political revolution of gays are undertaken because of the provocation of Myrna's letters. He wants to impress her. In the end of the novel, Myrna comes to New Orleans and rescues Ignatius. He would never admit to courting her, but he was trying to get her attention. In a backwards sort of way, his courtship has succeeded.

Saunders, Judith P. "The Great Gatsby: An Unusual Case of Mate Poaching," American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018): 138-174.

Thesis: Compare Ignatius Reilly to Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is undertaking a courtship, but is Ignatius doing so as well? Gatsby's efforts end tragically. Ignatius's efforts end comically.

Ignatius and Cosmo Kramer: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 31

Many of the entries in this series focus on some character who is similar to Ignatius Reilly or to the plot of Confederacy of Dunces. This is not one of those entries. Well, not entirely.

Ignatius Reilly is a slapstick hero. He conforms to all nine of the "Personality Traits of the Hero in a Physical Comedy" as detailed in the documentary "Laughing Matters" (see my blog entry from July of 2015). However, Ignatius is psychologically repressed. He defends his virginity. Despite being a physical comedian, he is learned, with intellectual pomposity.

Cosmo Kramer, a character on the 1990s sitcom "Seinfeld," is also a physical comedian. He falls, he crashes. He is an innocent fool who acts on his desires without worrying what others might think. He is not overly intellectual, and he is not pompous. On the show, many women are attracted to his honest expression of emotion (at least for brief relationships), much to the frustration of the other male characters. In season five, episode eleven, this sexual charisma is called "the kavorka."

Ignatius and Kramer can function in similar ways in a farcical plot. Both of them generate chaos in the social group which can reorder relationships. As I have stated in detail before, comedies often feature a small group where some members are lower in the status hierarchy than they should be, held down by a blocking character. The comic chaos reorders the relationships with the blocking character losing status and the deserving oppressed rising in status.

To give an example from Seinfeld, in season three, episode seven, called "The Cafe," George is trying to impress the woman he is dating, who is an educational psychologist, even though he does badly on intelligence tests. He agrees to take an IQ test, but then he passes the test out the window to Elaine, who is good at taking such tests. Elaine goes to the cafe to take the test. Kramer comes into the cafe, interacts with Elaine, and spills food on the test. George cannot pretend that he took the test. His false presentation as a smart person is undone by the chaos generated by the slapstick hero. His status is comically lowered in the estimation of a potential mate, thanks to the slapstick hero.

Thesis: Compare Ignatius Reilly to Cosmo Kramer. They are very different but can function in similar ways within the plot of a comic narrative.