One of my current research interests 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 is the essay: Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. "Lem, Central Europe, and the Genre of Technological Empire." In Peter Swirski (Ed), The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem. (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), 130-152.
This monograph of essays on Lem came from the first North American conference on Lem's philosophical and cultural legacy. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay is one of the more incisive and more heavily cited Lem scholars. I do not know his background, but this essay seems to come from the perspective of mid-20th century Eastern Europe.
His thesis is: "that the genre of science fiction is an expression of the political-cultural transformation that originated in European imperialism and was inspired by the fantastic ideal of a single global technological regime" (130). Science fiction is a fiction about technological control. I interpret Csicsery-Ronay's point to be that real-life empires--whether the Romans with their aqueducts, the Chinese with their canals and great walls, or the European empires of the late nineteenth century with their steam-driven ships and machine guns--depend on technologies.
Csicsery-Ronay defines the novel as a literary form that helps support the social construction of bourgeois nationalism. Bourgeois because its realism supports possessive individualism, and nationalistic because the novel is linguistically constituted, hence forming a community of readers within a language group. (133-134)
Csicsery-Ronay sees science fiction as a literary mediation between the bourgeois setting of realist novels and the realm of technoscientific empires. "One of science fiction's roles in the twentieth century has been to instil in national audiences a sense that its modernist struggles of national identity have been superseded by global struggles of technoscientific reason against nature and magic. ... its narratives concern the adventure of domination" (135). "Science-fiction artists construct stories about why this empire is desired, how it is achieved, how it is managed, how it corrupts (for corrupt it must), how it declines and falls, ... and how it is resisted" (137). Before there is empire, though, technoscience favors and celebrates the adventurer, "the Odyssean handyman" (139).
Csicsery-Ronay argues that Lem's fictions are critical of empire, just as Poland after World War II sat between the empires of NATO and the Soviet Union. While the heroes of science fiction within hegemonic nations are often powerful, "Lem's protagonists are almost never in a position of real power. ... They are not warriors, governors, ambitious adventurers; ..." (146).
"[Lem's] synthesis of premodern literary forms like the tale and the fable ... and his theoretical speculation on the power of technology to transform the very conditions of thought, with very little reference to concrete social and political changes, is characteristic of a culture that observes the competition of technological empires close at hand and seeks to transcend them with the only means available: passionate commitment to theory and science, uncontaminated by ideology or self-interest" (146).
Solaris fits into this scheme well. The alien in the novel is an enigmatic ocean that does not colonize, invade, or even threaten. Its attempts at interaction are mysterious. The humans seem to want to dominate it, but they really can't. "Solaris hangs in the cosmos signifying nothing. Its enormous powers are all self-intensive" (147).
