Solaris Four: A Novel and Two Movies

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: Swirski, Peter. "Solaris! Solaris. Solaris?" In Peter Swirski (Ed), The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem. (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), 172-179.

This monograph of essays on Lem came from the first North American conference on Lem's philosophical and cultural legacy.

Swirski's essay is quite brief. It compares the original novel to the two films which are based on the novel. The first film was directed by Tarkovsky and released in time for the 1972 Cannes film festival. The second film was directed by Soderbergh, starred George Clooney, and was released in 2002.

Regarding the novel, Swirski gives a long quote from Lem himself in an interview with Swirski from 1992. In that interview, he states, "If you take Solaris as a concrete example, I still maintain that the novel is well constructed because it--more precisely the library scene--clearly suggests the existence of an enormous body of professional literature on the subject of the planet and the ocean. The entire plot of the novel is, in a certain sense, an aftershock. The book records the twilight phase of solaristics; there had been thousands of hypotheses, and they all came to nothing" (173).

It is remarkable that Lem saw the library scene as the core of the novel. In my book club, that was the aspect of the book readers disliked the most. Clearly, Lem saw the novel as a philosophical story, while many readers were more interested in the love story. Swirski comments: "the author is more like the solaristic ocean, studying the human guinea pigs as they thrash in love and pain when face to face with the Alien." (175)

Well, if the enigmatic author is like the ocean, it is small wonder that movie directors look elsewhere.

Swirski argues that Tarkovsky gives us Dostoyevskian bombast, but that he leaves some of the novel's philosophical meat in his film. The bombast means that the film is "as overdone as a nine-hour roast" (177). Tarkovsky also gives us Freudian guilt, a prodigal-son tableau.

Swirski completely rejects the Hollywood version of the story as being completely drained of the philosophical weight. He says in his parting shot: "Make no mistake: Soderbergh's Solaris is both good and original. Unfortunately, what's good about it isn't original, and what's original ... well, you can figure the rest" (179).