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우리에겐 타르코프스키와 소더버그에 의해 영화화된 <솔라리스>(1961)로 더 잘 알려진 원작자 스타니스와프 렘(1921-2006)이 지난달에 세상을 떠났다고 한다. 이번주 <필름2.0>을 읽다가 알게 된 사실이지만, <씨네21>의 기사를 옮겨오면, "SF영화 <솔라리스>의 작가 스타니스와프 렘이 지난 3월27일 사망했다. 그의 생명을 앗아간 것은 심장 순환계 문제였다. 그는 폴란드 남부도시 크라쿠프에 위치한 한 병원에서 병마와 치열히 싸웠지만, 84살라는 고령의 나이로 버텨내긴 힘들었던 것."

"스타니스와프 렘은 1974년 로봇이 지배하는 세상에 대한 이야기 <사이버리에이드>를 발표하며 SF소설가로 이름을 날리기 시작했다. 하지만 그가 지금과 같은 세계적 작가가 된 것은 1984년과 2002년 두 차례나 영화로 만들어진 <솔라리스> 때문이다. 소설은 발표 당시 “상업문학 일변도의 미국 과학소설에 맞서 인류 문명의 오만을 풍자하는 철학적 작품”이라는 평가를 얻었다. 1984년작은 러시아의 거장 안드레이 타르코프스키가, 2002년에는 스티븐 소더버그가 감독을 맡았다."(*기사 내용중 타르코프스키의 <솔라리스>는 1972년작이다. 1984년작이라고 한 것은 부주의한 오류이다.)

사실은 이미 작고한 작가로 간주하고 있었기 때문에(망자에게 용서를!) 그의 부음은 잠시 낯설게 느껴졌다. 어쨌거나 고인의 명복을 빌면서, 이 참에 아직 챙겨두지 못한 그의 소설을 읽는 것도 올해의 과제로 남겨놓도록 한다(러시아에서는 문학전집이 아닌 철학/사상 전집에 렘의 책들이 들어가 있다). 더 많은 그의 책들이 소개되기를 바라는 의미에서 그의 홈피 등에서 필요한 자료와 이미지들을 옮겨온다. 위의 이미지들은 그의 자전적 회고록 <높은 성>의 영어판과 러시아어판 표지. 그리고 아래는 그의 간략한 전기이다. 뒷부분에는 영어로 돼 있어서 좀 불편하지만, <솔라리스>의 각 장에 대한 해설을 옮겨놓는다.

-Norbert Wiener begins his autobiography with the words "I was a child prodigy." What I would have to say is "I was a monster." Possibly that's a slight exaggeration, but as a young boy I certainly terrorized those around me. I would agree only if my father stood on the table and opened and closed an umbrella, or I might allow myself to be fed only under the table. I don't actually remember these things; they are beginnings that lie beyond the boundary of memory. If I was a child prodigy, it could only have been in the eyes of doting aunts. (...)

-In my fourth year I learned to write, but had nothing of great importance to communicate by that means. The first letter I wrote to my father, from Skole, having gone there with my mother, was a terse account of how all by myself I defecated in a country outhouse that had a board with a hole. What I left out of my report was that in addition I threw into that hole all the keys of our host, who also was a physician... 

(*)Stanislaw Lem was born in Lvov on September 12th 1921 to a family of a laryngologist. Since 1932 he attended the K. S. Szajnocha II State Grammar School in Lvov where he received a secondary school certificate in 1939. Between 1940 and 1941, after the occupation of Lvov by Soviet troops, Lem studied medicine at the Lvov Medical Institute:

-(...)  I got there in an indirect way, since I first took the entrance exam at the polytechnic, which I thought was more interesting. I passed the exam but as a representative of the "wrong social class" (my father was a wealthy laryngologist, i.e. bourgeois) I was not accepted... My father made use of his connections and with the help of professor Parnas, a famous biochemist, I started studying medicine - albeit half-heartedly.

(*)During the German occupation Lem worked as a mechanic helper and welder for a German firm that recycled raw materials. In 1944, when the Soviet army occupied the city for the second time, Lem resumed his medical studies. In 1946 Lvov was no longer on Polish soil and Lem as a "repatriate" moved to Krakow where he started studying medicine at the Jagiellonian University:

-I could have earned quite well as a welder... On the one hand it seemed tempting, since in Krakow we had to start from scratch. On the other, however, the thought that I would abort my studies was very upsetting for my father. For some time I could not make up my mind and I eventually opted for medical studies. 

(*) Between 1948 and 1950 Lem worked as a junior research assistant at the Konserwatorium Naukoznawcze (The Circle for the Science of Science) lead by doctor Mieczyslaw Choynowski.

-Every few weeks I had to take a night train and travel to Warsaw - I took the cheapest class since I was quite poor in those times - for endless discussions at the publishing house "Ksiazka i Wiedza". They tortured my Hospital of the Transfiguration, the number of critical reviews was continually growing and all of them proved the book's counterrevolutionary and decadent nature. I was told that this and that had to be redone... And since at the same time they gave me hope the book would eventually be published I kept on writing and revising... Because Hospital of the Transfiguration was considered improper from the "ideological point of view" I was obliged to write further episodes in order to achieve a "compositional balance"...

-In 1950 in the house of the Writers Union in Zakopane I met a certain fat gentleman and one day we went for a walk to the Czarny Staw. My companion was Jerzy Panski from the "Czytelnik" publishing house but I did not know it at that time. During our trip we talked about the absence of polish science fiction... Panski asked whether I was capable of writing such a book. I answered "yes" - not knowing who my companion was, thinking it was just an ordinary fat fellow who happened to be staying at the "Astoria", just as I was. After some time, to my great surprise, I received an author's agreement from "Czytelnik". Having no idea what the book will be about I filled in the blank space with the word "Astronauts"... and in a quite short time I wrote my first book that was soon published.

(*) In 1953 Lem married Barbara Lesniak, a medical doctor (radiologist).

-I met her around 1950 and after two or three years of siege she accepted my proposal. We did not have our own apartment at that time; I had a tiny room with mould on the walls and my wife, about to finish her medical studies, lived with her sister at the Sarego Street - so I became a commuting husband.  

-In those politically uninteresting times... we used to ski in Zakopane for one month. I also traveled to Zakopane in June because of hay fever, for which there were no medications in those times. I stayed at a house of the Writers Union and worked most of the time. During one of such marathons I wrote Solaris. The same method was employed in the case of some other books. Apart from that nothing interesting was going on; my wife worked as a radiologist and I was an ordinary member of the Writers Union... I still remember my first trips to the East German Republic, with the delegation of Polish writers, and later trips to Prague and the Soviet Union - where they adored me. 

(*) In 1973 in recognition of his achievements Stanislaw Lem was invited to join the Science Fiction Writers of America. However he was soon expelled from this organization because of critical remarks about low standards of American science fiction.

 

(*) In 1982, after the martial law in Poland, Stanislaw Lem left his homeland to study in Berlin as a scholar of the Wissenschaftskolleg. A year later he moved to Vienna. Living abroad Lem wrote his two last books that belong to the genre "fiction": Peace on Earth and Fiasco. The writer returned to Poland in 1988. 

(*) Stanislaw Lem is a member of the Polish Writers Association and the Polish Pen-Club. Since 1972 Lem is a member of the committee "Poland 2000" under the auspices of the Polish Academy of Sciences; in 1994 he also became a member of the PAU (Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci).  

 

Introduction

During the Soviet era, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem was the most celebrated SF author in the Communist world. Although he read Western SF when he was young, he soon found it shallow and turned for inspiration to the long tradition of Eastern European philosophical fantasy. Western readers not familiar with this tradition often misread his works, expecting more action-oriented, technophilic fiction. Solaris comes closer to being a traditional SF novel than most of his works, but its main thrust is still philosophical. There is a deep strain of irony which runs through this work, for all its occasionally grim moments.

The great Russian experimental director Andrei Tarkovsky made an important film based on the novel which is considerably more confusing that the book. (The pared-down 2002 version by Steven Soderbergh keeps amazingly close--for a Hollywood film--to Lem's original themes and ideas, but its emotional inertness (particularly on the part of George Clooney) prevents it from having the full effect intended. This is one case where reading the book before seeing the film may help you to experience the intended effect better. Perhaps Soderbergh remembered the anguish of Kelvin so clearly from his reading that he didn't realize the need to convey it more vividly to an audience that would not share the same memories.

Chapter 1: The Arrival

The novel begins as the narrator, a scientist named Kris Kelvin, is descending toward the surface of the mysterious planet Solaris. How many instances can you find in this chapter of failures to perceive, breakdowns in communication, etc.? This is to be the main theme of the book. Whereas conventional SF poses puzzles only to solve them, Solaris concentrates on the puzzling nature of reality and the limits of science. The ship that has brought Kelvin to Solaris is called the Promethus, a name associated with civilization and enlightenment in Greek mythology, but also with condemnation to terrible torment. As he enters the station suspended above the planet's surface, note the many instances of wear, disorder and confusion. In the original Polish, Snow's name is "Snaut." What do the many concrete details given suggest about the state of things in the station? Snow's strange initial reaction to Kelvin will be explained later. What features of this chapter are reminiscent of a mystery story?

Chapter 2: The Solarists

Keep in mind the scribbled word "Man!" as you read on. See if you can understand why someone would have written it. Why does Lem treat Kelvin's "premonition" as he does? Much of this novel is a well-informed satire on the process of scientific research and publication. What may seem to the novice like tedious passages of irrelevant exposition reminiscent of Jules Verne (what modern SF fans call "info-dumps"), are in fact often amusing parodies of academic scholarship--especially those which occur later in the novel. Whether or not you catch the humor in these passages, they are crucial for understanding the central themes of the novel. They provide a wide variety of interpretations which succeed only in revealing the minds of the interpreters, leaving Solaris as mysterious as ever. In this way they are strikingly reminiscent of the writings of another Eastern European master, Franz Kafka.

The ability of Solaris to control its own orbit anticipates some of the wilder fantasies built on the "Gaia hypothesis," according to which Earth has the ability to maintain conditions favorable to life. Solaris' ability to remodel the instruments created to study it resembles quantum physics' uncertainty principle: studying subatomic particles affects their behavior in ways that make it impossible to separate the observer from the observation. This theory underlies the whole novel, and embodies many of the most crucial problems facing modern science. "Ignoramus et ignorabimus" is a slogan of the ancient skeptics proclaiming the impossibility of certain knowledge: "We do not know and we will not [cannot] know." Skepticisms' approach to knowledge is being compared to that of quantum physics. What is the difference between these two theories: the "autistic ocean" and the "ocean-yogi?" What does the condition of Gibarian's room suggest? What plan of Gibarian's does Kelvin discover? In what way does the manuscript of this plan reflect the themes of the novel? Note how the ending of the chapter begins to resemble the mood of a ghost or horror story or monster movie. Watch how Lem begins to depart from traditional "monsters-from-outer-space" themes as the story unfolds.

Chapter 3: The Visitors

Even in 1961 the figure of the "giant Negress" would have been offensive to many Western readers; but keep in mind that Lem was writing in Poland, where there were very few black people. As it turns out, there are good reasons for her stereotypically cartoon-like appearance. How does Kelvin try to get more information about the X-ray experiments out of Snow? How did Gibarian die?

Chapter 4: Sartorius

"André Berton" is a pun on the name of the famous surrealist spokesman and leader André Breton, who delighted in breaking down logic by irrationally juxtaposing objects in an arbitrary fashion--an apostle of disorder and madness. ?artorius?is the name of a thigh muscle, not a common personal name in either Polish or English. Lem studied medicine, and was probably taken by the name when he encountered it in his anatomical studies. The identity and nature of Sartorius's child "visitor" are deliberately kept a secret. One can make guesses, but it would be a mistake to treat this as a conventional "mystery" to be "solved." How do we slowly come to realize that Sartorius' secrecy is motivated not so much by fear as by shame? What is significant about the "Negress's" feet? An old-fashioned technique of discovering whether one is dreaming or awake is pinching oneself. What more sophisticated method does Kelvin invent? What does this mean: "I was not mad. The last ray of hope was extinguished"?

Chapter 5: Rheya

The name rendered "Rheya" here is "Harey" in Polish, doubtless altered because it suggests the English masculine name "Harry." In what ways is Rheya like a traditional ghost? What does the hypodermic needle scar suggest, and how is it connected to what Kelvin "had said to her five days earlier"? Why does Kelvin prick himself with the spindle? How does Kelvin discover that this is not the original Rheya? Avenging ghosts deliberately set out to haunt those who have wronged them. In what way is Rheya different? Does this make her more or less terrible? How is the behavior of this Rheya different from that of the original? Why is it significant that she knows about "Pelvis"? What stops Kelvin from strangling Rheya? Why are there no fasteners on Rheya's dress? "Spanner" is British English for "wrench."

Chapter 6: "The Little Apocrypha"

Why is Snow now more willing to visit with Kelvin? The reference to the well-aimed ink bottle comes from a famous incident in which Protestant reformer Martin Luther was visited by the Devil in his study one day and threw an ink-bottle at the figure to frighten it away. Supposedly the stain of the ink remained visible on the wall. What does Snow mean by saying "We have two or three hours at our disposal"? Although scopolamine is famous as "truth serum" it is also a powerful sedative, and that is its use here. What is Snow's theory about the nature of the " visitors"? Snow's long speech on space exploration in the paragraph which begins "It's almost as if you're purposely refusing to understand" is one of the best-known and most often-quoted in the book. What are its main themes and how do they relate to traditional science fiction? "Succubi" is the plural of "succubus," a sort of evil spirit who haunts men by having sex with them. Why is Snow convinced that Solaris is not trying to destroy them? Why does Kelvin consider it important to point out to Snow that his burn wounds have not healed?

Note that this being the early sixties, a growth of beard is considered a sign of emotional collapse. Why does Snow say it might be worth while staying on Solaris although they cannot learn anything about the planet? To understand Berton's theory of how the ocean operates, one must understand something of Freud's theory of the unconscious (not to be confused with the "subconscious"). The unconscious consists of feelings and memories which have been suppressed from the conscious mind by "contrary feelings" mostly having to do with shame and guilt. Although they are not accessible directly, their presence is revealed in a distorted form in dreams and as a powerful distorting force which can cause involuntary mistakes in speech ("Freudian slips"), and neurotic obsessions and illnesses of various kinds. How do Solaris' activities seem to relate to the unconscious? Be careful not to use the common misspelling "unconscience."

Chapter 7: The Conference

What is different about Kelvin's second encounter with a "Rheya"? Why is he so horrified by the sight of the two dresses? What are the main superhuman qualities of "Rheya"? What can you infer from "Rheya's" eating patterns? What does Kelvin discover about the visitor's blood? The objections to Kelvin' s neutrino theory are perfectly sound. The whole passage is merely a pseudo-scientific way of expressing a mystery, though the basic concept is important to grasp. The ocean has somehow created objects with a structure that differs at the deepest level from ordinary atomic structure. An angstrom is one-hundred-millionth of a centimeter. A neutrino has almost no mass and hardly interacts with other matter at all. It therefore makes a good basis for an unsolvable mystery. It is not clear whether or not there is any conscious intention behind the creation of the "phi-creatures." Which possibility is more frightening, in your opinion?

Chapter 8: The Monsters

In what way is this speech of "Rheya's" ironic: "I'm such a coward"? What kind of book does "Rheya" choose to examine? In the long passage describing Giese's work we learn more about the "mimoids." Their name comes from "mimic" and the suffix "oid," which implies similarity. This sort of loving detail is a feature of Jules Verne's fiction, but here it serves a different function. Whereas Verne is seeking to educate (sometimes simply copying out long passages from reference books), Lem uses a Kafkaesque technique to bewilder the reader with a plethora of concrete detail which does little to unveil the mystery, only multiplying possibilities, though in brilliant language. An "erg" is the standard unit of energy, defined as the amount of work done by one dyne acting through a distance of one centimeter. A dyne is the unit of force which in one second can alter the velocity by one centimeter per second of a mass of one gram. Analyze the philosophical statement in the paragraph which begins "The human mind is only capable. . . ." What are its implications? How has Kelvin's attitude toward "Rheya" changed? What does "I'm divorced" mean? According to Freud, the rational and moral parts of our mind dwell in the conscious realm. It is their activity which keeps the unconscious suppressed. Therefore what is the point of beaming encoded versions of their conscious thoughts at the ocean via X-rays? What is the alternative plan, and how does it differ from this?

Chapter 9: The Liquid Oxygen

How is the arrival of the "new" Gibarian different from the other strange appearances which have occurred? What has happened to the tape recorder, and why is it important? What is different about the suicide in this chapter? What does "Rheya" learn from it? How have Kelvin's feelings changed? How have "Rheya's" feelings about herself changed? "First contact" with an alien species is a major theme in SF. What does Kelvin have to say on this subject?

Chapter 10: Conversation

Why does Kelvin shout "You're out of your mind!" when Snow suggests that he determine whether the phi-creatures can exist away from the planet's surface by examining the vehicle he earlier launched into orbit? According to the Greek historian Herodotus, when the Persian general Xerxes was frustrated in his attempt to invade Europe by a storm at the Hellespont which made it too rough to cross, he had the stream scourged by beating it with rods, cursing it. This has traditionally been used as an illustration of tyrannical egotism and irrationality. In the paragraph beginning "I'll give you an answer" Snow keenly analyzes Kelvin's motives. What are his main points? Why is Kelvin afraid to carry out the proposed experiment?

Chapter 11: The Thinkers

According to Kelvin, what did human beings have in mind when they first set out for other worlds? This chapter contains a long satirical passage in the Kafkaesque mode tracing the history of Solaristics, a passage also reminiscent of some of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. The more scholarship you have read, the more amusing it will be. If you are not familiar with much of this sort of thing it may well seem pointless. Identify a few of the patterns that run through this history. The most important passage, one which underlies the philosophy of the entire novel, concerns the pamphlet by Grastrom. This is the other most famous passage in the novel. What are its main messages?

Chapter 12: The Dreams

Describe Kelvin's dream (the long one, told in the paragraph beginning "On the fifteenth day"). What do you think it means? When Snow calls Sartorius "Faust in reverse" he is thinking of the fact that one of Faust's first uses of the devil's powers after signing his famous contract was to make himself decades younger, greatly prolonging his life. "Agonia perpetua" is Latin for "eternal torment, referring to the punishment of the damned in Hell. Snow calls Rheya " Aphrodite, child of Ocean." Why? (Hint: look up Aphrodite in any encyclopedia or mythology handbook.) What do you think Kelvin is feeling in the last paragraph of this chapter?

Chapter 13: Victory

Why can't Rheya and Kelvin "live happily ever after?" How does Kelvin's last dream affect the emotional impact of the immediately following scene? Why does Kelvin want to destroy Solaris at first? What does this title of this chapter mean?

Chapter 14: The Old Mimoid

How has Kelvin been changed by his relationship with "Rheya?" Manicheanism was a religion founded by a third-century prophet named Mani, distantly related to Persian Zarathustrianism. Like the latter, it argued that the presence of evil in the universe could be explained by the existence of an evil god named Ahriman who was perpetually in conflict with a good God named Ahura-Mazda. The sort of imperfect god Kelvin describes had in fact been described by at least two writers before him: Nikos Kazantzakis presents such an image of God in many books, particularly The Saviors of God, and Olaf Stapledon in The Star-Maker; and Lem specifically acknowledges having read the latter.

What is the argument that Kelvin makes against the ability of human beings to create gods according to their individual desires? What do you think of this argument? What do you think Kelvin is trying to do as he plays with the waves? Why is it significant that he cannot actually touch the surface of the ocean? What does the growth of the flower in his hand suggest? "Finis vitae sed non amoris" means "life ends but not love." What does the last sentence of the novel mean?

06. 04. 14.

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