Stanisław Lem, Solaris
Jan. 2nd, 2021 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinSo having re-reviewed The Invincible in the light of Bill Johnston's translation, I guess I should do the same for Solaris. The difference is less stark here--the previous translation, from the French edition by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, was not that bad; it just had its language somewhat more distorted by passage through an intermediate language. The most noticeable thing was that it changed the names of some of the characters.
This is a hard one to write about, though, because while it's clear that Solaris absolutely is one of Lem's greatest novels (and there's so much packed into it that it may exhaust my ability to analyze it), it's also one of those older books (written 1959-60) where you're brought up short by that one bit that has aged so poorly that it makes it hard to proceed. And to explain the one bit, I need to get spoilery about the plot.
The ocean and the guests
Solaris is a planet almost completely covered by an ocean of apparently living goop that may be a single organism, and exhibits complex enough behavior that it may even be intelligent. The story takes place at the tail end of a largely unsuccessful program of attempts to understand what's going on there and establish some kind of contact with the ocean. The protagonist, a psychologist named Kris Kelvin, arrives at a research station hovering over the surface of the ocean, whose few remaining crew seem oddly disturbed, have let the place decay and initially react with baffling hostility to his arrival.
Pretty soon he learns why: something impossible and alarming is happening. Beings with forms seemingly extracted from the memories and obsessions of the crew are materializing on board the station. The living ocean must have something to do with it, but why and how, nobody can say. Maybe it's an attack; maybe it's an attempt at communication. They're not hallucinations--Kris can see them too, and they're solid and tangible.
That one bit
Here's the one bit that threatens to take me right out of the book. The very first one of these "guests" that Kris encounters is apparently an apparition out of the mind of Gibarian, a scientist who, he learns, committed suicide just the morning before his arrival. She's an incongruous figure: an enormous black woman wearing nothing but a grass skirt, who is described in the terms of visceral revulsion and horror that one might expect from a white guy in 1959 freaked out by a picture in National Geographic. It comes across as pretty racist and a couple of other -ists too. Fortunately, the passage is short. It's possible to read it sympathetically in a number of ways (Kris is a potentially unreliable first-person narrator, and whatever in Gibarian's mind led to this is left unexplained) but I don't particularly feel like defending this passage and I wish Lem had made other choices here. Moving on.
Kris and Harey
We never get a completely clear look at the guests of the other two crewmembers, Drs. Snaut and Sartorius, because they're so intent on hiding them--the guests always seem to be characters associated with intense feelings of guilt or shame. But Kris's own guest appears soon enough: it's his dead wife, Harey*, who killed herself at the age of just 19 or 20 about ten years earlier, after a fight with Kris in which he threatened to leave her (so he blames himself). It seems that it's impossible to fully get away from these beings, or even to kill them: separated from their associated humans, they transform into a terrifying state in which they can inflict superhuman damage to remove any obstacles. Kris's first reaction to the Harey-being is horror, and he disposes of her by launching her into space in a probe rocket (in a scene that really makes me wonder whether the design of this station involved any thinking about safety at all)--but it's no use; she just reappears. (Snaut explains that they've all tried that already.)
Faced with this, Kris ultimately can't resist his feelings for Harey, and starts sincerely falling in love with her regenerated form, as she acts more and more like a human being with her own thoughts and feelings, rather than a character out of his memory. And from here on, one of the major threads in the novel is a heartbreakingly tragic love story, one of Lem's very rare seriously-intended romances. It's good and sad and there's no point in spoiling it.
Yes, as I think Sam pointed out once, it's saying something that Lem's most fully-realized female character is technically not even human. It is indeed very "written by a guy who didn't write women a lot in 1959-60". It's affecting nevertheless.
The Solaricists
That's the A-story of this book, the one that probably got it two different movie adaptations that both more or less emphasize the love story. But the parts where Lem is the most Lem-like here, and some of the most wondrous and bizarre parts of the novel to my mind, are the interludes in which Kris takes a break from the ongoing nightmare to peruse books in the Solaris station's library.
Whole generations of scientists, it seems, have attempted to study Solaris, and they've produced a vast scientific literature. This is the kind of thing Stanisław Lem absolutely loves to imagine. He describes in great, phantasmagoric detail the incomprehensible eruptions and structures that appear and disappear on the surface of the planet, which have all sorts of arcane names: extensors, rapidos, mimoids, symmetriads and asymmetriads, each behaving in a stranger manner than the last. There are whole catalogues of the hypotheses put forth and disputed by various scientists about what all of these structures are doing and what their function might be.
One section describes a discredited account that Kris thinks might have some bearing on the characters' current predicament, in which a pilot encounters structures made out of the Solaris ocean goop that seem to be mimicking scenes and people from human society, perhaps extracted from the mind of a missing explorer. The ocean seems to be interested in us, but exactly for what, no one can say. But this being a Lem novel, it's not much of a spoiler to say that no Rosetta stone making it all make sense ever appears. Lem, here as elsewhere, is interested in the tragedy of humans beating their heads against the wall of the unknown.
Adaptation
Much of this stuff about the ocean of Solaris and the human struggle to understand it gets lost in the film adaptations, which is probably why Lem never liked them (but while I find this material riveting, making a compelling movie of it would be very difficult). Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film did make a valiant effort to get some of it in, but he made the odd choice of re-linearizing the timeline of the story and putting this history right at the beginning, before Kris Kelvin even gets to Solaris, which means his movie takes a very long time to get going. I do admire the fact that he attempts to depict the ocean at all, with the resources available to him. Tarkovsky's vision of the decrepit Solaris station is absolutely spot-on, and Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk are 100% who I imagine as Kris and Harey.
The strange phenomena of the ocean actually could be depicted pretty well using modern CGI (some of it evokes quaternion Julia sets and Mandelbulb fractals to me) but it's not the kind of detail that generally lends itself to a blockbuster film. Stephen Soderbergh made the choice of simply sidelining most of it in his 2002 adaptation with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. If I recall correctly, his images of Solaris just look like images of the Sun in invisible wavelengths of radiation. He makes the movie very shiny and clean compared to Lem's stage-setting.
*The Kilmartin and Cox translation anagrammatizes "Harey" as "Rheya", and Soderbergh's movie follows that. I don't know whether that was their choice or that of the French edition they were working from.
This is a hard one to write about, though, because while it's clear that Solaris absolutely is one of Lem's greatest novels (and there's so much packed into it that it may exhaust my ability to analyze it), it's also one of those older books (written 1959-60) where you're brought up short by that one bit that has aged so poorly that it makes it hard to proceed. And to explain the one bit, I need to get spoilery about the plot.
The ocean and the guests
Solaris is a planet almost completely covered by an ocean of apparently living goop that may be a single organism, and exhibits complex enough behavior that it may even be intelligent. The story takes place at the tail end of a largely unsuccessful program of attempts to understand what's going on there and establish some kind of contact with the ocean. The protagonist, a psychologist named Kris Kelvin, arrives at a research station hovering over the surface of the ocean, whose few remaining crew seem oddly disturbed, have let the place decay and initially react with baffling hostility to his arrival.
Pretty soon he learns why: something impossible and alarming is happening. Beings with forms seemingly extracted from the memories and obsessions of the crew are materializing on board the station. The living ocean must have something to do with it, but why and how, nobody can say. Maybe it's an attack; maybe it's an attempt at communication. They're not hallucinations--Kris can see them too, and they're solid and tangible.
That one bit
Here's the one bit that threatens to take me right out of the book. The very first one of these "guests" that Kris encounters is apparently an apparition out of the mind of Gibarian, a scientist who, he learns, committed suicide just the morning before his arrival. She's an incongruous figure: an enormous black woman wearing nothing but a grass skirt, who is described in the terms of visceral revulsion and horror that one might expect from a white guy in 1959 freaked out by a picture in National Geographic. It comes across as pretty racist and a couple of other -ists too. Fortunately, the passage is short. It's possible to read it sympathetically in a number of ways (Kris is a potentially unreliable first-person narrator, and whatever in Gibarian's mind led to this is left unexplained) but I don't particularly feel like defending this passage and I wish Lem had made other choices here. Moving on.
Kris and Harey
We never get a completely clear look at the guests of the other two crewmembers, Drs. Snaut and Sartorius, because they're so intent on hiding them--the guests always seem to be characters associated with intense feelings of guilt or shame. But Kris's own guest appears soon enough: it's his dead wife, Harey*, who killed herself at the age of just 19 or 20 about ten years earlier, after a fight with Kris in which he threatened to leave her (so he blames himself). It seems that it's impossible to fully get away from these beings, or even to kill them: separated from their associated humans, they transform into a terrifying state in which they can inflict superhuman damage to remove any obstacles. Kris's first reaction to the Harey-being is horror, and he disposes of her by launching her into space in a probe rocket (in a scene that really makes me wonder whether the design of this station involved any thinking about safety at all)--but it's no use; she just reappears. (Snaut explains that they've all tried that already.)
Faced with this, Kris ultimately can't resist his feelings for Harey, and starts sincerely falling in love with her regenerated form, as she acts more and more like a human being with her own thoughts and feelings, rather than a character out of his memory. And from here on, one of the major threads in the novel is a heartbreakingly tragic love story, one of Lem's very rare seriously-intended romances. It's good and sad and there's no point in spoiling it.
Yes, as I think Sam pointed out once, it's saying something that Lem's most fully-realized female character is technically not even human. It is indeed very "written by a guy who didn't write women a lot in 1959-60". It's affecting nevertheless.
The Solaricists
That's the A-story of this book, the one that probably got it two different movie adaptations that both more or less emphasize the love story. But the parts where Lem is the most Lem-like here, and some of the most wondrous and bizarre parts of the novel to my mind, are the interludes in which Kris takes a break from the ongoing nightmare to peruse books in the Solaris station's library.
Whole generations of scientists, it seems, have attempted to study Solaris, and they've produced a vast scientific literature. This is the kind of thing Stanisław Lem absolutely loves to imagine. He describes in great, phantasmagoric detail the incomprehensible eruptions and structures that appear and disappear on the surface of the planet, which have all sorts of arcane names: extensors, rapidos, mimoids, symmetriads and asymmetriads, each behaving in a stranger manner than the last. There are whole catalogues of the hypotheses put forth and disputed by various scientists about what all of these structures are doing and what their function might be.
One section describes a discredited account that Kris thinks might have some bearing on the characters' current predicament, in which a pilot encounters structures made out of the Solaris ocean goop that seem to be mimicking scenes and people from human society, perhaps extracted from the mind of a missing explorer. The ocean seems to be interested in us, but exactly for what, no one can say. But this being a Lem novel, it's not much of a spoiler to say that no Rosetta stone making it all make sense ever appears. Lem, here as elsewhere, is interested in the tragedy of humans beating their heads against the wall of the unknown.
Adaptation
Much of this stuff about the ocean of Solaris and the human struggle to understand it gets lost in the film adaptations, which is probably why Lem never liked them (but while I find this material riveting, making a compelling movie of it would be very difficult). Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film did make a valiant effort to get some of it in, but he made the odd choice of re-linearizing the timeline of the story and putting this history right at the beginning, before Kris Kelvin even gets to Solaris, which means his movie takes a very long time to get going. I do admire the fact that he attempts to depict the ocean at all, with the resources available to him. Tarkovsky's vision of the decrepit Solaris station is absolutely spot-on, and Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk are 100% who I imagine as Kris and Harey.
The strange phenomena of the ocean actually could be depicted pretty well using modern CGI (some of it evokes quaternion Julia sets and Mandelbulb fractals to me) but it's not the kind of detail that generally lends itself to a blockbuster film. Stephen Soderbergh made the choice of simply sidelining most of it in his 2002 adaptation with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. If I recall correctly, his images of Solaris just look like images of the Sun in invisible wavelengths of radiation. He makes the movie very shiny and clean compared to Lem's stage-setting.
(There was apparently also a Soviet TV adaptation in 1968, which I never heard of until just now.)
Both Tarkovsky and Soderbergh felt compelled to tack an additional twist onto the ending of Lem's story. The book doesn't really end with a twist at all, just an evocative scene that brings the A- and B-threads together in a final tableau of hurt and bafflement.*The Kilmartin and Cox translation anagrammatizes "Harey" as "Rheya", and Soderbergh's movie follows that. I don't know whether that was their choice or that of the French edition they were working from.