25/6/07

Re Solaris: note how the giant ocean exhibits characteristics and forms of a microscopic organism (an analogy that becomes most apparent in the scene where Kris examines Rheya's blood); thus in it the qualities of the vast and the minuscule are combined. Note also how it combines body-like qualities with architectural ones: the descriptions of its formations (extensors, mimoids, symmetriads) are distinctly physiological, to the point of being indecent, even obscene; but the architectural language in which they are described neutralises this effect. This combination of the immense and the microscopic, of the organic and the inorganic, is surely integral to Lem's fundamental achievement in the work, which is to devise formations that both invite a reading as metaphors and at the same time resist it (in a manner not dissimilar to certain aesthetic innovations of modernism). Your first reading of the symmetriads, for example, was as some symbol of collective human endeavour and striving towards some ultimate self-realisation or knowledge (whether social, philosophical or existential), which - this being the work of an east European writer - always and inevitably falls short of its aim and collapses back into chaos and disorder. Think of Newtonian physics being succeeded by Einsteinian relativity theory, which in turn will be succeeded by something else; in each case the beautiful and complex symmetriad that represents the theory (and Lem makes this connection quite overt) is doomed to degeneration and decay. This was presumably part of the attraction of Lem's book for Tarkovsky, who so obviously delights in the Vergaenglichkeit of things. On this view, Solaristics, the study of the planet, must be a metaphor for philosophy, the study of knowledge itself; and the despair and discouragement experienced by its practitioners arises only from the fact that it is a philosophy that has mistaken itself for a science, which expects to 'progress' and uncover substantive truths about the world; whereas this, of course, is not the function of philosophy at all. Perhaps the enlightenment held out by the book, if it holds any out at all, amounts merely to one of realising this mistake.