#57 = Volume 19, Part 2 = July 1992
Elyce Rae Helford
"We are only seeking Man": Gender,
Psychoanalysis, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris
We think of ourselves as the Knights of Holy Contact. This is
another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need
mirrors. (§[6]:72)
In this brief passage from one of SF’s most popular and
powerful novels, Lem describes much of what is both important and misleading
about efforts (literary or actual) to achieve human/alien contact. He recasts
astronauts and scientists as medieval knights on religious pilgrimages, men who
quest to assert cultural dominance over new realms. They seek only to encounter
that which will prove the significance of their work and worldview. Such quests,
Lem suggests, do not require investigation of outer space, because human
explorers have their eyes closed to the alien Other as well as to themselves. To
see the external universe with open eyes, the quest must begin within.
Reference to this self-validating quest as a search for
"Man" (in the English translation) also illustrates the powerful
patriarchal bias waiting to be reflected in the mirror of self-understanding.
When we admit that space exploration is about humanity, not extraterrestrials,
we must further specify that such work is done predominantly by men to validate
a "masculine" worldview (quite like the traditional SF depicting such
exploration). Self-examination is a possible solution: the scientific gaze must
be turned inward, at the construction of human identity and its gender
implications, before turning outward. To provide mirrors which help to expose
and challenge the closed, patriarchal minds of Solaris’s futuristic
knights, Lem emphasizes gender-suggestive metaphoric figures, including an
ocean-like alien and the replica of a woman it produces from the unconscious
mind of Kelvin, the novel’s questing protagonist. In a highly symbolic tale of
self-understanding achieved through human-alien contact, Lem provides a
compelling psychoanalytic study of the human mind and the construction of
gender.1
Solaris tells the story of Kris Kelvin, a scientist who
travels to the much-studied planet Solaris to continue attempts to communicate
with the planet’s sole native inhabitant: a huge, sentient body of plasma-like
substance which takes up most of Solaris’ surface and which humans can only
call an "ocean." The ocean is described by scientists and theorists as
either undesirous or incapable of communication with humans. However, soon after
Kelvin’s arrival on Solaris’ space station, he feels a presence which is
strongest as he sleeps. He first sees the figure of a "primitive"
black woman, an example of what he and Dr. Snow (another scientist on the
station) come to call "Phi-creatures" or "visitors": beings
produced by the ocean from repressed desires in the human unconscious. Several
days into Kelvin’s stay, he wakes to find his own visitor, a representation of
his former wife Rheya, who committed suicide upon his desertion of their
marriage ten years previously. At first, Kelvin spends much energy trying to
destroy her; but when he learns that Phi-creatures are indestructible, he
attempts to understand these creatures as discourse, as alien communication.
Despite Kelvin’s attempts to distance himself physically and
intellectually from the Phi-creature Rheya, he eventually falls in love with
her. He swears he will stay on the planet even if the other humans leave, while
Snow and Sartorius, the two other scientists on the station, still desire to be
rid of their less pleasant visitors (neither is fully described to the reader,
but each seems intent on tormenting the human from whose mind it was produced).
The scientists decide to bombard the ocean with waking human brainwaves in an
effort to force/help the alien to understand their anguish. With the assistance
of a hesitant Kelvin, the attempt is eventually successful; the scientists find
the creatures can now be destroyed. As the novel ends, the simulation of Rheya
"commits suicide" with the help of Snow, because she knows Kelvin will
never return to Earth while she is "alive." Despite her death,
however, he stays on Solaris, depressed and alone, yet optimistic, hoping for
additional communication from the still-alien ocean.
An excellent starting point for understanding the relationship
between Solaris, gender, and psychoanalysis is Alice Jardine’s concept
of gynesis: a process by which metaphors for the "feminine" are
encoded as "spaces" or "gaps" into postmodern theories which
attempt to resist traditional philosophical absolutes. In Gynesis:
Configurations of Woman and Modernity, Jardine examines the postmodern
preoccupation with rejecting and rethinking western "master
narratives": humanistic philosophies which rely on absolutes such as
"Man," "History," and "Truth." Theorists who
attempt to understand and explain existence and experience through these
traditional narratives largely omit acknowledgement of their authorial subject
positions (most importantly, the fact that they are generally white western men
of a privileged class). Reconceptualizing such narratives necessarily involves a
reexamination of the patriarchal politics of western philosophic thought.
Psychoanalysis, for example, is largely based upon a rethinking of traditional
representations of subjectivity. For psychoanalytic theorists such as Freud and
Lacan, the "Subject" must not be seen as a reified, unified whole,
actively shaping "his" universe; but rather as a complex and divided
self, full of repressed desire and an inability to comprehend the meanings of
and reasons for his own thoughts. And "he," in Freud and Lacan, must
be distinguished carefully from "she," for male and female sexuality
evolve in separate and distinct directions. While psychoanalysis does remain
complicit with many aspects of the traditional and artificial construction of
gender within patriarchy, it effectively destabilizes the patriarchal myth of
the universal subject (most often represented as "Man").
Theoretical approaches which reexamine master narratives, such
as psychoanalysis, reveal many of the unstated assumptions of humanistic
philosophies. However, they often fail as challenges to tradition because they
replicate certain universalizing and essentializing tendencies of the
philosophical approaches and constructs they reconsider. For Jardine, the most
significant problem is the tendency of such theory to replace denial of
the issue of gender with an encoding of what is labeled
"feminine," a process she labels gynesis. "Woman,"
she writes, "is and always has been, of course, the original problematic
object" (36 n.18), and therefore:
In the search for new kinds of legitimation, in the absence
of Truth, in anxiety over the decline of paternal authority, and in the midst
of spiraling diagnoses of Paranoia, the End of Man and History,
"woman" has been set in motion both rhetorically and ideologically.
(36)
As the scientists on Solaris furiously work to understand an
alien resistant to study and classification and able to extract information from
the unconscious mind of its observers and use it to create beings in human form,
they face the (postmodern) cultural crisis Jardine describes. Through the figure
of the alien and the simulation of "woman" it produces for Kelvin, a
representation of the myth of the universal subject, Lem articulates on a
popular literary level the process Jardine describes.
A metaphoric inscription of "woman" can be seen from
the opening pages of the novel, which describe Kelvin’s voyage from the "mothership"
Prometheus (suggestive of the nurturing, life-giving spirit from Greek
mythology who, while male, enacts the role of "mother" to humankind)
in a capsule-shuttle to the surface of Solaris. It is difficult not to read the
depiction as graphically gendered, from the birth of the shuttle out of the
mothership to its immediate metaphoric reconstruction as phallic
"shaft," "knifing through space" in a "steadily
mounting heat" (§[1]:2). The imagery of sexual climax is obvious as the
capsule enters Solaris’s atmosphere, "shaken by a sudden jolt, then
another," until "The whole vehicle began to vibrate...." Kelvin
states, "I felt no fear. I had not undertaken this long voyage only to
overshoot my target!" (§[1]:2). He is powerful, aggressive, absolutely
assured of his performance. The shuttle-as-phallus indicates Kelvin’s own
feelings of control over his environment. The planet, in this discursive
context, is constructed as passive receptacle, the inactive and unresisting
object of male desire. And it is significant that these opening images are so
blatantly sexualized; the gender metaphorization of space travel directs us to
the gender encoding we will see in the depiction of the alien and the
Phi-creatures it produces.
Once Kelvin leaves the capsule and enters the space station
which hovers over the alien-ocean, he begins to lose his self-confidence. He
observes the ocean through a window in the space station, and fears the
alienness of his surroundings:
The wave crests glinted through the window, the colossal
rollers rising and falling in slow motion. Watching the ocean like this one
had the illusion—it was surely an illusion—that the station was moving
imperceptibly, as though teetering on an invisible base; then it would recover
its equilibrium, only to lean the opposite way with the same lazy movement.
Thick foam, the color of blood, gathered in the troughs of the waves. For a
fraction of a second, my throat tightened and I thought longingly of the Prometheus
and its strict discipline; the memory of an existence which seemed a happy
one, now gone forever. (§[1]:8)
Here we can read the ocean as a great womb, a womb which
cradles and protects the fetal Kelvin within the amniotic membrane of the space
station. Kelvin seems involved in a birth and rebirth cycle in which he plays
multiple roles and over which he has little control. There is strong suggestion
of reincarnation as he is "born" of the masculine mother(ship) Prometheus,
propelled into instant male adulthood (in which he engages in sex with a new
mother), and then turned back into a fetus within the Solarist ocean-womb.
However, this new "mother" is different from the original. Kelvin, as
confident product of earth technology and science, does not return to the
"strict discipline" of the Promethean patriarchal womb, but rather to
an unknown alien body which comes to represent a metaphorization of the
"feminine." The question for the novel as it addresses the concept and
implications of gynesis becomes how this rebirth will enable Kelvin and
the reader to rethink the gender-coding of experience. A productive way to
examine the question is to study the gender implications of Kelvin’s
experiences as they suggest elements of feminist and psychoanalytic theories
which engage in the process of gynesis.
Kelvin’s first reaction to the alienness of his new
surroundings is an attempt to render them less so by immersing himself in human
histories of the planet and its sole inhabitant. By reading Terran theories on
the alien rather than studying the ocean itself, Kelvin feels safely distanced.
Furthermore, this focus on texts reveals a distrust of his own subjective
responses to the alien. As the novel progresses and Kelvin is
"contacted" by the ocean through the generation of the Phi-creature
Rheya, he becomes increasingly obsessed with Solarist studies. When most
threatened, he retreats to the station’s library to read; this windowless
space is centered in the station and the ocean is completely shut out.
Eventually, however, Kelvin realizes the futility of reading
and rereading these texts. They may offer interpretations of the phenomenon that
is the ocean, but each historian or scientist can only produce a personal and
highly subjective hypothesis and narrative. There is no "Truth" that
can explain the ocean and Kelvin’s experiences. When he finally does make
physical contact with the ocean at the conclusion of the novel, Kelvin claims to
see it "with a different eye": his own subjective vision. The primary
impetus for Kelvin’s turn from literary histories to personal experience is
his reexamination of self through his relationship with the Phi-creature Rheya.
Kelvin arrives on Solaris the embodiment of the confident
scientist, seeking to explore and explain his surroundings through allegedly
objective studies. However, the presence and actions of the ocean quickly
destabilize his self-confidence and eventually lead him to a new constitution of
identity. Although all the scientists wish to escape the Phi-creatures, the
ocean, and the planet for most of the novel, only Snow directly acknowledges the
value of their experience for personal enlightenment. He tells Kelvin, "It
might be worth our while to stay. We’re unlikely to learn anything about it,
but about ourselves..." (§[6]:77). Snow realizes that humans not only fail
to see the truly alien but will not and cannot until they better understand
themselves. And this understanding is what their experiences with the ocean of
Solaris should provide.
A vast reflective pool which defies human understanding, the
ocean communicates only through the creation of Phi-creatures, causing the
scientists to turn inward before they attempt to focus their gaze more directly
upon this alien. It remains entirely Other no matter how hard humans try to
construct it in familiar terms. Within the histories of Solaris are frequent
attempts to anthropomorphize the ocean; yet it resists identification. Theorists
label it "autistic," elevate it to the status of "cosmic
yogi," scientifically classify it by type, class, and category (of which
the ocean is for each, of course, the only example), even call it a gigantic
"brain." All this becomes meaningless busywork in light of living with
simulated and indestructible projections from the unconscious mind. Even the
accepted label "ocean" is a misleading description. In the face of
this huge body of "plasma" and its constant metamorphosis through
various temporary growths or distortions which humans rigorously classify as
"extensors," "mimoids," "symmetriads," and "asymmetriads,"
even "ocean" is overly simplistic and grossly inaccurate.
The resistance of the ocean to classification is part of its
function as mirror for humanity. Its generation of the Phi-creatures is another.
These beings absorb almost all of the scientists’ time and energy. And while
the humans attempt to understand the ocean by understanding the Phi-creatures,
they cannot help but reflect on their own psychological construction as they
live with these fleshly projections of the mind. Through the creation of the new
Rheya, Kelvin is forced to contemplate his guilt over the suicide of the
"real" Rheya, the nature of his feelings for both Rheyas, and his
tendency to repress emotions and memories. He sees himself reflected back by the
actions of the ocean as a fragmented and complex being, manipulated by an alien
he thought he could control.
The fact that the ocean’s only communication with the humans
is through the generation of creatures projected from the human unconscious
highlights the psychoanalytic emphasis of the novel. A reading of human-alien
relations as represented through language in Solaris through the work of
Jacques Lacan illuminates this focus and highlights the process of gynesis
in the novel. In "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I
as revealed in the psychoanalytic experience," Lacan discusses the stage at
which the infant of six to eighteen months first begins to observe himself in
the mirror. While still in the phase of life which Lacan calls the
"Imaginary Order," in which the infant—always male—does not yet
consider himself an entity separate from his mother, the mirror stage
establishes the first sense of identity the child will have: an imaginary one.
Because he does not yet possess the skills of language which will allow him to
construct a self linguistically, he is not alienated from his union with the
mother; however, it is this stage at which the infant develops awareness of his
potential as an independent being.
The infant sits, Lacan claims, fascinated with his own image
in a mirror (whether literal or in the figurative form of another child),
observing himself as a discrete unit within the space of the world, an
apparently unified and capable whole or Gestalt. Yet this image is also
profoundly alienating, for the infant is still utterly dependent on others,
motor coordination is largely undeveloped, and, most importantly, the infant has
envisioned this coherent self by identifying with an image: he merges with a
mirrored reflection. Thus this early identification is what Lacan refers to as
"misrecognition" (méconnaissance); the infant mistakes his
dependent and complex existence for a unified and independent image. Lacan
concludes:
this Gestalt...symbolizes the mental permanence of
the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it
is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the
statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or
with the automaton, in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own
making tends to find completion. (2-3)
Kelvin seeks to find self-validation and
"permanence" within the library stacks of the enclosed space station;
yet, even when he realizes that this world cannot protect him from the alien’s
communication (which informs him that he is not in control of his universe), he
is still in the "mirror stage": he continues to misrecognize himself
through the "phantoms that dominate him," the ocean and the
Phi-creature Rheya. His attempts to "find completion" continue to
alienate him.
For Lacan, the most profound alienation comes with the
inauguration into language and the "Symbolic Order." It is at this
stage, according to Lacan, that the child comes to separate himself from the
mother. When the child can state "I am," he consciously identifies a
self and awareness of his existence as an independent being. The child gives up
his sense of unity with the mother, the unity of the Imaginary Order, and begins
to take his place within the accepted social and sexual order of his culture.
For Lacan, the alienation of the child’s entry into the Symbolic Order creates
the split between the conscious and unconscious mind. Through the break from
imaginary unity with the mother, the child gains a sense of self; yet this
creates a feeling of lack, an inevitable and insatiable desire to regain that
bond which is now gone forever. This desire, furthermore, is inexpressible
through a conscious use of language, because it was originally experienced at a
pre-linguistic stage of development. The unconscious becomes the repository of
this inexpressible desire (a "space" to be filled) and constitutes
"the locus of the Other," the unreachable site where desire is
directed. Solaris illustrates movement in the "Symbolic Order"
for Kelvin when Rheya —the object of his desire—is finally gone. Only then
can he identify a self and reach out (literally and figuratively) to the alien.
His attempts, however, will always be thwarted or, more literally, repelled, for
the site of original desire is unreachable.
Sexual identity is an important element of Lacan’s reworking
of Freud. The infant before the mirror, growing into the child who breaks his
essential bond with the mother to gain his sense of self, is decidedly male.
Only the male child can successfully separate himself from the mother; only he
can come to speak the language of the Father—the law of the phallus, for Lacan.
However, the figurative terminology of psychoanalysis developed through the
study of "real" women who came to represent the inherently deviant
"Other" (psychoanalytically constructed "woman") to the male
norm. These fundamental premises reveal the gynesis which is necessarily
a part of psychoanalytic theory. Jardine writes:
Within this strange gap between the female bodies at the
inceptions of psychoanalysis and the male subject taken as its norm, and
especially within the resultant syntax, lies the power (and, for some, the
faults) of psychoanalysis itself. "The hysteric is a woman who can also
become a man" becomes, in a hallucinatory conceptual leap, the very
definition of hysteria as an object of psychoanalytical knowledge. Through
this gap, itself hysterical, slipped the confusion between women and
"woman," a confusion which in turn generated a perpetual oscillation
that has never been able to move beyond its first contradictory articulation.
(160)
Lacanian theory provides a suggestive framework for explaining
Kelvin’s psychic development on Solaris. The opening sexual imagery which
involves Kelvin in a cycle of birth and rebirth suggests that his landing on
Solaris can be read as the birth of a fetus from the Solarian ocean-womb; from
this perspective, he develops from infancy through the course of the novel.
Through fascination with the alienness of the ocean-as-mirror, Kelvin at first
sees a whole and unproblematic "Self" reflected back. But he soon
realizes that this vision is misrecognition. He must acknowledge that he is
controlled by the actions of the ocean and is incapable of leaving the planet.
He is not the autonomous and powerful subject he misthought himself to be. This
is made most clear to him through the ocean’s generation of the visitors,
physical manifestations of the psychic divisions between the conscious and the
unconscious. When he is confronted with Rheya, Kelvin is forced to abandon his
former false sense of self. Through her, he confronts a gender-encoded
construction of the complex processes of the human mind.
Kelvin is incapable of questioning fully his own
gender-encoding tendencies, primarily because the psychoanalytic deconstruction
which he undergoes is engaged in the process of gynesis. A study of Kelvin’s
relationship with the simulation of Rhea clarifies the limitations of his
denaturalization of identity through contact with Solaris’s ocean. The new
Rheya—the embodiment of a constructed "feminine"—naturally loves
Kelvin from the moment of her appearance, and wishes nothing more than to be
with him. She does not remember the "real" Rheya’s suicide nor
Kelvin’s desertion of their relationship. In addition, because she is at a
loss to explain her existence, Kelvin can aptly cast her as a child, a role she
accepts and one to which she is attracted. It is clear why Kelvin, upon learning
that Rheya cannot be separated from him (all Phi-creatures are uncontrollably
compelled to remain near the person from whose mind they were created), tells
his beloved, "For some reason that neither of us understands, it seems
that... you are forced to stay near me. And that’s fine with me, because I can’t
leave you either..." (§[8]:108). This incarnation of Rheya is devoid of
original thought or action. Her entire existence is dependent on Kelvin’s,
both emotionally and physiologically. In the end, she can only reenact her
former suicide, but this time to help Kelvin to be free of her, not in reaction
to his abandonment. The act offers less evidence of an independent consciousness
than did her original self-murder. And, though troubled by the fact that she
cannot be apart from him (more likely because he sees reflected in her a
troubling and dependent image of himself than because he wishes her to attain an
individual identity), Kelvin never resists this Rheya’s self-effacing,
sacrificial tendencies. He helps her to know that she is not the
"original" Rheya, but never encourages her to develop herself
independently from him (except when he occasionally forces her to stay away from
him, to give him the "space" to misrecognize himself as the unified
individual he once thought he was). Although he seems to question his
objectification of the ocean, he continues to objectify Rheya as the product and
property of his own mind and to love her for her passivity.
Thus, while Kelvin may be transformed through his experiences
on Solaris, not only does he fail to question his patriarchal attitude toward
Rheya, but his understanding of the ocean does not and cannot reach past the gynesis
in the psychoanalytic theory through which he can be argued to have been
deconstructed. At the conclusion of the novel, Kelvin ceases to envision the
ocean as passive object of human (male) conquest, yet he continues to objectify
it. After Rheya’s death, he inverts his perspective and deifies the ocean as
an "imperfect god":
I’m not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of
the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his
essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power,
fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating
things that lead to horror. He is a...sick god, whose ambitions exceed his
powers and who does not realize it at first. (§[14]:197)
Despite the male gender reference for this god, its connection
with imperfection, limitation, and horror suggests the "feminine."2
This is a god(dess) who lacks, whose power is fallible and incomplete.
"She" also indicates Kelvin’s conception of a "feminized"
self: a self necessarily limited by and to his internalization of the construct
"woman" represented by interaction with the Phi-creature Rheya as
product of his connection with Solaris’s ocean. Kelvin’s reconstituted sense
of self has encouraged him to embrace the "feminine," but is as devoid
of an understanding of "real" women as Rheya, the instrument of his
transformation and product of his mind, is devoid of subjectivity.
Through Kelvin’s relationship with Rheya we come to
understand the construction of gender identity and the effects of the process of
gynesis as represented in Solaris. However, representations of
gender can also be explicitly and inseparably tied to identifying factors such
as race, sexual orientation, and class. "Woman" can become specified,
for example, to indicate "woman of color," "lesbian woman,"
"impoverished woman," or combinations of these metaphoric figures.
While examination of the construction of race and culture are not central to Solaris,
the process of gynesis extends to such issues through the presentation of
Dr Gibarian’s Phi-creature.
Through the ocean’s attempt at communication, Kelvin sees
Rheya, a manifestation of the ideal passive (white) woman. Dr Gibarian sees a
woman as well, but one who is far more racially and culturally suggestive, a
manifestation of an exotic "primitive" African or Caribbean woman. His
unconscious produces a replica of "woman" which highlights
ethnocentric assumptions within himself that he might never have had to deal
with before coming to Solaris. We cannot be sure what Gibarian learns from his
visitor; however, he is willing to kill himself to escape from what she
represents to him. It is possible to argue that Gibarian could not live with his
ethnocentric sexism as it was made flesh by the ocean. To be followed constantly
by so symbolic a figure of stereotyped gender and racial prejudice must have
been intolerable. Kelvin is certainly horrified by her:
A giant Negress was coming silently towards me with a
smooth, rolling gait. I caught a gleam from the whites of her eyes and heard
the soft slapping of her bare feet. She was wearing nothing but a yellow skirt
of plaited straw; her enormous breasts swung freely and her black arms were as
thick as thighs. Less than a yard separated us as she passed me, but she did
not give me as much as a glance. She went on her way, her grass skirt swinging
rhythmically, resembling one of those steatopygous statues in anthropological
museums. Terror-stricken, I stared blankly around the big, empty hall.
(§[3]:30)
It is not surprising that Kelvin can only explain Gibarian’s
Phi-creature as a "steatopygous statue" and "monstrous
Aphrodite" (30). She does reveal the gender and race orientation of
Gibarian’s mind, but we receive only this superficial understanding because we
do not see the two interact, nor are we allowed into Gibarian’s mind. However,
we can add to an understanding of Kelvin’s attitude toward the construction of
gender through his reaction to Gibarian’s visitor.
The statues to which Kelvin likens this figure are probably
what are called "Venus figurines" or "fertility goddesses."
Many traditional archaeologists and anthropologists have argued that these small
statues were "objects in some ancient, and presumably obscene, ‘fertility
cult.’ They were often viewed as obese, distorted erotic symbols; in other
words, as prehistoric counterparts of Playboy centerfolds" (Eisler
24). Contemporary ecofeminist theorists question such assumptions, arguing that
the pornographic explanations of the statues were produced within the sexist and
ethnocentric context of traditional (patriarchal) archaeology. Riane Eisler
claims, instead, that these statues are representations of the life-giving
powers of the world.... they are precursors of the Great Goddess still revered
in historic times as Isis in Egypt, Ishtar in Canaan, Demeter in Greece, and
later, as the Magna Mater in Rome and the Catholic Virgin Mary, the Mother of
God. (24)
Such reinterpretation produces a feminist reading which can
help us to see the figure produced from Gibarian’s mind not as an
"obscene" representation of exotified "blackness" and/or
"womanhood," but as a representation of the powerful "Earth
Mother," the creator and nurturer of all life, the "Great
Goddess." Kelvin’s inability to envision the "giant Negress" in
such powerful terms is typical of his limited and limiting visions of women (as
more clearly represented by Rheya and his affection for her). However, the
situation is still further complicated by the essentialism of Eisler’s
feminist revision of traditional archaeology, an essentialism which makes gender
a determinant of subjectivity.
As I noted above, it is possible to infer that Gibarian killed
himself to escape the sexism and racism he saw in himself through what we see as
a highly symbolic Phi-creature. He might even have recognized her power in ways
that Kelvin did not and could not, because it was from his personal unconscious
that she was evoked. However, even if Lem’s representation was meant to
encourage a feminist reconstruction, it fails to offer a satisfactory
questioning of gender and race. Just as Rheya represents only a metaphoric
"woman," so Gibarian’s visitor permits only a metaphoric
understanding of "woman of color" or "primitive woman,"
whether understood traditionally or through essentialist feminist
reconstruction. While the feminist reading may be preferable because it grants
power to Gibarian’s objectification, it still does not permit an understanding
beyond the symbolic and essentialized realm.
Lem’s examination of gender in Solaris relies upon a
metaphorization which keeps Kelvin from understanding what Jardine might call
the "hysterical" slip between women and "woman." Yet if we
can understand the limitations of Kelvin’s transformation, we can begin to
destabilize and problematize the tendency to enact gynesis. The furthest
we may get is to Jardine’s realization that no linguistic usage or
representation of "woman" is unproblematic. As Jardine asserts:
To refuse "woman" or the "feminine" as
cultural and libidinal construction (as in "men’s femininity") is,
ironically, to return to metaphysical—anatomical— definitions of sexual
identity. To accept a metaphorization, a semiosis of woman, on the other hand,
means risking once again the absence of women as subjects in the struggles of
modernity. (37)
For this reason, while examinations of cultural constructions
of "woman" and "femininity" have proved extremely useful for
feminist and psychoanalytic critics, the limitations inherent in reliance on the
metaphorization of gender must be acknowledged. Critical theory such as Jardine’s,
which helps us to complicate the implications of this process through
self-reflective analysis, and study of popular yet philosophically dense fiction
such as Lem’s are perhaps the most liberatory rhetorical response to this
postmodern phenomenon.
NOTES
1. Throughout this study, the term gender will be used
to refer to culturally-constructed notions of sex (the "masculine" or
the "feminine," "man" or "woman"), while sex
will indicate the biological (the female or the male, men or women).
2. For further discussion of the relationship between
"horror" and the feminine within the context of science fiction, see
Barbara Creed’s "Alien and the Monstrous- Feminine" and
"Gynesis, Postmodernism, and the Science Fiction Horror Film," both
published in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction
Film, ed. Annette Kuhn (London & NY, 1990).
WORKS CITED
Eisler, Riane. "The Gaia Tradition and the Partnership
Future: An Ecofeminist Manifesto." Reweaving the World: The Emergence of
Ecofeminism. Ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein. San Francisco,
1990. 23-34.
Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and
Modernity. Ithaca, NY, 1985.
Lacan, Jacques. "The mirror stage as formative of the I
as revealed in the psycho analytic experience." Ecrits: a Selection.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. NY, 1977. 1-7.
Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin and
Steve Cox. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Abstract.—This essay examines
issues of gender representation in Lem’s Solaris through focus on the
character Kelvin and his relationships with the ocean alien of Solaris and its
reproduction of his former wife Rheya. I argue that Solaris illustrates a
process in which gender constructs such as "woman" and the
"feminine" are textually encoded in attempts to reconsider misleading
traditional philosphical absolutes such as "Man." By reading the
construction of gender in the novel through the denaturalizing work of theorists
Alice Jardine and Jacques Lacan, I invite the reader to consider the gender
implications of Solaris as postmodern discourse. (ERH)
Back to Home