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.
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