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.
Article discussed: Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. "Modeling the Chaosphere: Stanislaw Lem's Alien Communications." In N. Katherine Hayles (Ed), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. (U. of Chicago Press, 1991), 244-62.
Last month, I discussed an article in which Istvan Csicsery-Ronay discussed his views on the political context within which science fiction operates and where Lem's work fits into that context. This month's topic is another essay by Csicsery-Ronay, one that is fifteen years older than the essay I discussed last month. This essay discusses three Lem texts: Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (1968), and Fiasco (1986).
Csicsery-Ronay studies Lem's theme of the inability of humans to communicate with aliens. To Csicsery-Ronay, Lem's major theme in his later work is the problem of "carousel reasoning," in which the thinker cannot escape from the logical system in which the premises and conclusions are trapped. Csicsery-Ronay calls this bubble of circular reasoning the chaosphere.
For the humans, the goal is to break through the chaosphere to have true knowledge. The humans have two possible paths in this attempt: either to build a system of order that is all encompassing or to embrace randomness as a way to escape the limitations of ordered models. (This choice almost sounds like Thomas Pynchon's theme of order versus chaos, order, which is associated with the death instinct and chaos, which is life-affirming.) The effort to communicate with aliens is a metaphor for a dialectic between order and chaos.
Csicsery-Ronay argues that Lem's three alien contact novels grow increasingly toward a postmodern perspective. In Solaris, the world-ocean can reach into the minds of the humans on the station and create visitors who reflect some of their inner memories and feelings. Attempts to understand the enigmatic ocean generate a large scientific literature of Solaristics, but it goes nowhere. The breakthrough of the chaosphere is effected by the world-ocean, and it is achieved by the visitor-Rheya.
In His Master's Voice, the focus is on what appears to be a message from aliens. One cannot be certain that it is actually a message. Perhaps it is a message from the universe itself. It is more postmodern than Solaris, because it presents the problem of knowledge as a problem of language. Is the text a text? Was there a sender?
Csicsery-Ronay sees Fiasco as completing the depiction of carousel reasoning. In this novel, both the humans and the aliens display an "aggressive self-consciousness" (259). There is no wise alien who is superior to humans and whom the humans cannot harm. Instead, contact degenerates into war and the destruction of the aliens.
I have not read the latter two Lem novels, so I have no opinion about Csicsery-Ronay's interpretation of them. As for Solaris, Csicsery-Ronay insists that "the uncertainty Visitor-Rheya creates cannot be resolved" (252). He sees two mutually incompatible readings: first, a romance of contact with a superrational alien, and second, "an ironic, self-deconstructing satire of it." For myself, I don't think they are mutually incompatible. The contact with the wise, all-knowing alien is consistent with the inability of the humans to actually understand that contact. The alien of Solaris seems to understand us, even if we cannot understand it.
