SOURCE: “Resisting Monsters: Notes on Solaris,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, Pt. 2, July, 1994, pp. 173–90.

[In the following essay, Weinstone discusses the characterization of monsters in Western literature. Weinstone examines Mary Shelley's character, Frankenstein, and Lem's character, Rheya, in Solaris as notable departures from this tradition.]

Our monsters have always resisted us, and until recently, resistance was futile.¹ Beginning with the earliest Greek texts, the Western narrative encounter between man and monster has done the work of reinforcing the political and cultural hegemony of propertied males. In the Greco-Roman canon, man fought against monsters so that he might return home, reanointed as lord over property, women, and armies. Ontologically, these stories placed the beast outside of the social, heterosexual domestic and human modes of production. Monsters were made, like men, by gods. They lived, geographically, at a distance from human society; the hero had to leave home to do battle with them. Monsters took up positions at the boundaries between society and nature, man and animal, and male and female, threatening contagion between dualistic categories, but ultimately affording opportunities for men to reinforce these boundaries.

The ur-text of this master narrative is obviously Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus'sovereignty over wife and property is threatened when the hero is detained in foreign lands after fighting in the Trojan war. In order to return home and reinstate his domestic power, Odysseus must pass through a zone filled with semi-human monsters: the Sirens, Cyclops, et al. In this borderland, categories such as human/nonhuman, male/female, and animal/man are confused. Odysseus gains in strength as he defeats these monster-threats to the dualistic categories he employs to enforce his unequal dominion at home, i. e., the oppositional, hierarchically ordered categories which ensconce the propertied male in the topmost position. Odysseus'claim to his land is preserved; his wife is delivered from the sexual claims of her would-be suitors. The borderland monsters have played out their cautionary roles in this deeply conservative account; they disappear until the next time they are needed as foils for enforcing the hero-male's rule.

Today, our monsters are robots, cyborgs, genetically altered creatures, and aliens who attempt to take up residence within a necessarily altered human domestic sphere or within human sites of production, including human bodies. Instead of enforcing cultural and political norms, these constructed beings function as interpolators: their presence within causes breakdowns, interrupting, disrupting, and redistributing power. Unlike the god-made monsters faced by Odysseus, contemporary monsters are products of human technology, or are alien constructs produced by their authors for the express purpose of creating opportunities to successfully confuse, destroy, or recombine oppositional dualisms such as human/nonhuman, biological/mechanical, male/female, and the like.² Without such hierarchies firmly in place, agency, or the power to act upon, is no longer the special province of the unitary subject “Man.”

The people who give birth to contemporary monsters tend to be marginalized themselves: women, people of color, Jews, members of sexual minorities, etc. In books such as Jewelle Gomez's Gilda Stories (1991), whose main character is a Black, lesbian vampire, and Marge Piercy's He, She and It (1991), which tells the parallel tales of two Jewish cyborgs, contemporary narratives of resisting monsters center, not on the efforts of men to conquer the beast, but on the struggle of the beasts themselves: the complex, continuing, and sometimes violent resistance of “others” to hegemonic power.

In He, She and It, a male cyborg is programmed by a rebellious woman scientist to function sexually, and to relate sexually in ways normally associated with the female, e. g., to desire the pleasure of his partner above all else. The woman scientist has, in fact, implanted this need for intimacy and connection in the cyborg expressly to counteract potential violence that might arise as a result of his machine-function, which is to serve as a kind of cyborg-security guard. The cyborg's sexual relationships become a focal point as confusion about his status as human or as property mounts, but the cyborg defends himself by refusing to resolve the question of whether he is human or object, man or machine. Self-defined, he is both. “I'm a cyborg … but I am also a person. I think and feel and have existence just as you do” (§43:389). He refuses to relinquish any of his identities, to be categorized, and thus controlled, by his creators.

In resisting forces that seek to fix them as unitary objects, with unitary origins, and unitary identities, modern monsters enact stories of rebellion against multiple forms of colonization, especially colonization-as-oversignification. By “colonization” I mean to indicate all of the violent processes, including representational processes, by which people—e. g., women, Third World people, poor people, people of color, and lesbian and gay people—are represented as and acted upon as objects available for domination. Because modern science has replaced religion and philosophy as the master describer/signifier, it makes sense that science fiction might be the place to look for oppositional narratives to the colonizing activities of masculinist scientists who are engaged in “the quest for total control over the processes of life,” including control over evolution, nations, and human production.³ I call this culture of master-signifier science, i. e., most of the scientific culture we now have, “science-as-colonialism.” My interest is in surveying SF's [science fiction's] opposition to science-as-colonialism by tracing the interventions of resisting monsters, interventions which I will argue began with the daemon in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This paper, then, is an introductory attempt to work out some of the terms of this resistance, as established by Shelley, and then to take a first look at a contemporary resisting monster: Rheya in Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris.⁴

1. Frankenstein. Science-fiction productions are oftentimes deeply xenophobic, militaristic, sexist, and imbued with military-techno-erotic complexes. But in Frankenstein, the originary science-fiction novel, Mary Shelley first articulated SF in opposition to scientific claims to the mastery of women, nature, and nations. She achieved this by transforming the role of the monster in Western narrative from that of an object lesson for would-be transgressors to a literal embodiment of the journey from total objectification to monstrously problematic liberation.⁵

In 1816, when Mary Shelley created the daemon in Frankenstein, the monstrous, and monsters themselves, had already begun precipitating into more nearly successful disruptive forms. Gothic narratives such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, William Beckford's Vathek, and Matthew Lewis' The Monk depict land theft, incest, and rape (the violent appropriations at the edge of social consciousness), with women, Third World peoples, and homosexuals (the monster-peoples held at bay) seeking recognition and revenge. Narratively, the monstrous and monsters necessitate increasingly violent re-repression to secure the male, European, heterosexual domestic sphere. Shelley created the first man-made monster who, though born to mirror and serve, instead successfully resists destruction and abject servitude, and whose exclusion from human society is not an occasion of social triumph or heroism, but an indictment of that society.

Frankenstein is a feminist critique of both science and science-as-colonialism. Written in the aftermath of the French revolution, Frankenstein stands as a kind of marker at the intersection of the birth of modern evolutionary science, the expansion of British colonial power, and the beginnings of emancipation movements that eventually took hold throughout Europe and the colonies. From a feminist point of view, Frankenstein is concerned with masculinist science's appropriation of female reproduction. By allowing Victor Frankenstein to frame himself as the god, father, and owner of the daemon he creates, Shelley forces attention to a lacuna in Frankenstein's narrative of the transfer of life. That lacuna serves as a performative gap for the members of the human species who can already create life: women. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has noted, “in a novel like Frankenstein a critical meditation on the emergence of a technological subject and of a colonial subject can be appropriately embodied finally only, although never seamlessly, in a narrative that takes the maternal work of embodiment as its manifest subject” (vii-viii).

But Shelley's reconfiguration of the monster is also a rebuttal to the scientist-hero's takeover of the projects of imperialism. Although social Darwinist justifications for the domination of “subject races” were not articulated until later in the century,⁶ Shelley lived in a time when debates about slavery were being argued in the context of ideas of evolution, order, and hierarchy in human affairs.⁷ Ann K. Mellor notes Shelley's “recognition of the expanding and increasingly dangerous degree of cultural and scientific control over the resources of nature, whether dead matter or living races” (113). This recognition finds expression in the manufactured body of the nameless daemon in which Shelley encodes debates of the day regarding scientific man's mastery of nature with the imperialist thrust to maintain subject races. Early on in his efforts to construct the daemon, Frankenstein speaks of his dream that science will anoint him the master of a new race of his own making:

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.

(§4:54)

Here, surely, is the language-marriage of the scientist and the colonialist. The scientist, through techne, breaks through the bounds that separate men from gods, i. e., he now controls life and death. Through science, he makes dark become light, creates happy and excellent natures, i. e., the re-naturalized colonized, who will be his servants. He pictures himself as the father in a relation of benevolent dictatorship to his subjects. The relationship is represented as nearly voluntary. He will “deserve” their obeisance. The issue of ownership and slavery is obscured by language that generates overlapping metaphors of the scientist as god/father/owner and the colonized as natural (but really placed-in-nature) objects open to (in fact, manufactured for) domination.

In Frankenstein, the daemon's resistance to domination is portrayed primarily by his outrage at Frankenstein's and society's refusal to recognize his humanity:

Everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. … Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? They spurn and hate me.

(§10:100)

Here, the daemon insists both on his status as Frankenstein's creature, and simultaneously on his possession of a soul, of humanity. He acknowledges his radical difference from Frankenstein and Frankenstein's “fellow creatures,” while at the same time he insists on his right to be angry that they have denied him the “bliss” of a relationship with them. The daemon's move away from A-or-not-A epistemologies of identity foreshadows the moves of contemporary monsters, women, Third World peoples, and other “others” who have taken up the daemon's demands for inclusion as monsters, insisting on multiple subjecthoods and the multiple perspectives of vision these bring.

As Donna Haraway has so eloquently written, “We must disbelieve in both nature and society and resist their associated imperatives to represent, to reflect, to echo, to act as a ventriloquist for ‘the other’” (311). She calls for “building new collectives out of what is not quite a plethora of human and unhuman actors” (327), for “a new narrative of collective life” (297) based not on “imperializing essences” (296) but on alliances, mergings, and symbiosis among humans, animals, machines and all the “beings” of our world. This narrative is being written right now, and as a starting point to understanding it, I have chosen to look at the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris (1961). This work reflects a multiplicity of colonizations and profound resistance to colonization through the character Rheya, herself multiply constructed as a literal personification of a colonized woman, and as a technological product of an extravagantly generative alien entity.

2. Solaris. The subject of Solaris is colonization, especially those colonizing activities that proceed from hegemonic science. In Solaris, Lem positions oversignification as the essence of scientific colonization. Oversignification, in Lemian terms, is a one-way relationship of naming, describing, explaining, defining, and identifying. In other words, the medium of colonization is representation. Edward Said might have been giving a precis of Solaris when, in “Representing the Colonized,” he wrote that “To represent someone or even something has now become an endeavor as complex and as problematic as an asymptote, with consequences for certainty and decidability as fraught with difficulties as can be imagined” (206). In Solaris, these “difficulties” have everything to do with the resistance of those who are the objects of representation.

Lem pits a manufactured alien being, Rheya, against her sentient Ocean-creator and a group of male scientists, whose relentless categorizing and anthropomorphizing activities supply much of the narrative's humor. Like Frankenstein's daemon and the cyborg in Piercy's He, She and It, Rheya resists oversignification by disrupting totalizing categories such as subject/object, human/nonhuman, and biological entity/machine. As a result, the scientists are forced to confront the limitations of their unidirectional world view and must grapple with the possibility that they inhabit a world of multiple, constitutive, and sometimes unalterably alien agencies.

Solaris begins, like all our stories of rebelling robots, cyborgs, and marginalized “others,” with colonization at the point of refusal: with the story of the resistance of a constructed being to both scientific and other forms of subjugation. Briefly, Solaris tells of four scientists in a space station orbiting an alien planet, Solaris, whose surface is almost entirely covered by a stubbornly generative, sentient Ocean. The Ocean engages in a “never-ending process of transformation” (§2:23). It is “bewilderingly alive with movement” (§8:112), producing canyons of “yeasty colloids,” “gelatinous walls,” and “ranks of waves … like contorted, fleshy mouths …” (§8:112–13). Generations of scientists try to make contact with the Ocean and fail, eerily reiterating some of the same questions that Shelley asked in relation to her daemon, questions that have always been asked by colonizers about the colonized: Is the alien sentient or is it not? What does it know? How does it communicate? Can it be believed? Are its actions cruel or merely indifferent? Is it deserving of compassion? Who is studying whom?

The Ocean resists interpretation via the scientific method promulgated by the scientists orbiting in the space station; it never repeats itself, which makes scientific verification of its forms impossible. Nonetheless, the “Solarists” continue their categorizing activities, pointlessly creating a new classification for this species of one (“Type: Polythers; Class: Syncytialia; Category: Metamorph” [§2:20]) and busily naming parts of the Ocean's tumultuous surface after themselves. Carl Malmgren says of Lem that he “systematically interrogates the frames of intelligibility that human beings, scientists in particular, bring to the encounter [with the alien]; invariably he demonstrates how such frames are limited, or subjective, or emotionally colored, or simply inappropriate, hopelessly anthropomorphic” (§2:28). The very fact of the Ocean's “alienness” renders it resistant to human scientific interrogation, which cannot establish communication on anything but its own anthropomorphic terms.

Yet the Ocean does, as Robert M. Philmus notes, “engage in something at least distantly akin to human creative thought” (§13:187): it engages in representational processes that result in formations that the scientists presciently dub “mimoids.” At times, the mimoids appear as simulacra of human objects and machinery. These reproductions resemble human hegemonic representations of “the other” in that they are “simplifications that might be considered grotesque—practically caricatures” (§8:114) and in that they promise “not the slightest prospect of communication … the entire process [begins and ends] with the reproduction of forms” (§8:116). So, the Ocean is both the object of the scientists'attempts at colonization and a subject which can produce its own rough representations.

The mimoids stimulate the scientists’ efforts to make contact with or “read” the Ocean, efforts which ultimately fail. But the Ocean does seem to succeed at reading the scientists, confronting them with their own, internalized stock of mimoids. The story opens as the fourth man, and the narrator of Solaris, Kris Kelvin, arrives and discovers that after being bombarded with x-rays in an illegal experiment,⁸ the Ocean has begun to pluck images out of the minds of the scientists and turn them into very real visitors, called “Phi creatures,” now inhabiting the space station along with the scientists. Kelvin describes his first encounter with a visitor, a prêt-à-porter colonized being in the form of a “giant Negress” whom the Ocean has created from the mind of the scientist Gibarian.

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.

(§3:30)

The Negress is an imprint of old, earth-style colonization, recognized and made flesh by the Ocean which, as both potential colonizer and object of colonization, is perfectly positioned to confront the scientists with their own internalized objects. In every respect, the Negress is oversignified: by her sex, her color, her size, the whites of her eyes, her dress, and her fertility-doll breasts. She stands as a metaphor for Lem's condemnation of the colonial scientist's approach to alien cultures, an approach which has as its goal, not enrichment by other cultures, but assimilation and co-option, a mirroring/devouring activity which seeks to turn peoples and things into readings of its own desires.

On one level, Solaris critiques “Man's” attempts to colonize space, his great quest for Contact. However, by presenting us with the Negress first, a woman, a woman of color, an exoticized sexual other, the colonizer's image of a Third World person, and a figure of enslavement, Lem positions the colonization of space as one activity in a continuum of colonizations; he posits a consanguineous relationship between the subjugation of women, racism, scientific domination, the colonization of space, the colonizing which is Man's obsession with categorizing, explaining and imposing epistemologies on the unknowable, and most especially the colonizing which is the act of defining. Lem's critique of colonialism, as he broadly defines it,⁹ is articulated by Snow, one of the other scientists on the space station, who says in the book's most frequently quoted passage:

We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.

(§6:72)

This is a definition of colonization for our own fin-de-siècle: a devouring narcissism cloaked in humanitarianism. The Negress, object of an eroticized paternalism, bears perhaps no relationship to anything other than the desire of the colonizer-scientists for control over life and over the worlds of the living. The Negress reflects back to the scientists only their own inability to succeed at anything other than the marking of surfaces with their own images.

How does Lem portray resistance to this relentless re-writing or re-presenting of “the other” by the colonizer?

3. Rheya. Rheya is the Phi creature the Ocean creates from Kelvin's subconscious. A replica of Kelvin's dead wife, Rheya is a multiply-colonized, ontologically-vexed being. She is both the Ocean's manufacture and Kelvin's woman “other”: a manifestation of man's colonization and subjugation of the female.¹⁰ Rheya stands in a unique ontological position. She is not one of the freestanding beings, i. e., she is neither one of the humans nor the alien Ocean. She occupies a gap, brought into existence only to serve as a parodic critique and perhaps as a bridge between two master signifiers: she is the oversignified creation par excellence.

In the first moments after her “birth,” before Rheya begins to build a fragile autonomy, she resembles the mimoids. She is “reduced to certain characteristic expressions, gestures and movements” (§5:58). Furthermore, she appears wholly a product of Kelvin's colonizing imagination. “I have the feeling that I've forgotten something … that I've forgotten a lot of things. I can only remember you [Kelvin]. I … I can't remember anything else” (§5:58). Here, Rheya's interior space is entirely taken up by her relationship to Kelvin. What she has been fashioned to forget is her “self.” But from these first moments onwards, Rheya begins to change. Her journey starts with a vague feeling that something is amiss, and then develops into an active striving for autonomy. In a 1979 interview, quoted by Alyson Parker, Lem described Rheya's dilemma as “the freedom or non-freedom of the programmed mind” (§13:188). In the terms of the novel, if she is to achieve a measure of freedom, her struggle must be to divest herself of deterministic significations and build her own subjectivity. She does this by deliberately breaking down boundaries between binarisms of subject/object, human/ nonhuman, and biological entity/machine. But unlike her Greco-Roman progenitors, Rheya does achieve some success in frustrating the hero-scientists’ project, in “smashing the mirror,” and in gaining a measure of self-acceptance, synthesizing her identities, while resisting the Western imperative for what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls “Authenticity as a need to rely on an ‘undisputed origin’” (94).

3.1. Subject/Object. Solaris is a critique of the scientific method's relentless anthropomorphism and the foolishness of the quest for alien contact by beings who refuse to look inside and make contact with themselves. As Elyce Rae Helford notes, the scientists “seek only to encounter that which will prove the significance of their work and worldview. Such quests … 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” (167). Lem sets out to interrupt both the unidirectional gaze of the scientists and the narrative gaze of Kelvin by returning it with the impenetrable, unknowable alien gaze of the Ocean's creation, Rheya. Yet, the scientist's gaze is not so much returned as repulsed, subverting the men's urge to merely change places. In this way, Lem inscribes in Rheya the power to confuse subject/object boundaries and offers the possibility that the scientists might realize fuller versions of themselves by learning to occupy both subject and object positions simultaneously.

From the moment Kelvin enters the space station, he feels that it is he who is being watched. He passes a door on the way to his cabin. On the door is a strip of plaster. Scribbled on the plaster, in impermanent pencil, is the word “Man” as if the inhabitants of the space station have been carelessly labeled for observation. Once in his cabin, Kelvin hesitates to get undressed because of his sensation that he needs “a shield” (§2:13). Later, he is sure he is being watched, reporting that “the night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers” (§2:26). This feeling intensifies as the moment in which the Ocean creates Rheya draws near.

When Rheya enters, the alien gaze seems to concentrate in and emanate from her. Her gaze is active, yet at the same time, unreadable. “She watched me with quiet interest. … Her eyes reflected the red sun. … she examined the room with an enquiring, scrutinizing gaze …” (§5:54–57). Like the scientist's gaze, Rheya's gaze also moves out, towards Kelvin, but does not reveal what questions it asks of him; it is opaque. Looking at her, Kelvin sees the reflection of the alien sun; neither he nor the reader can see into her.

As if to counter this impenetrability with what he is more familiar—his own version of the female—Kelvin's first description of Rheya illuminates her from the neck down as a sexualized, quiescent body.

The Curtains were half drawn, and there, opposite me, beside the window-pane lit by the red sun, someone was sitting. It was Rheya. She was wearing a white beach dress, the material stretched tightly over her breasts. She sat with her legs crossed; her feet were bare.

(§5:52)

Further on in the passage, Rheya's gaze evokes an urge to violence. “She went on gazing at me, an expression of surprise on her face. I thought of throwing something at her, but, even in a dream, I could not bring myself to harm a dead person. I murmured: ‘Poor little thing, have you come to visit me?’” (§5:53). This urge to violence, to minimize her subjecthood by speaking to her as if she were a child, seems to be motivated by confusion. What is she thinking? What is she seeing when she looks? Why is she surprised? Later, Rheya is able to repudiate Kelvin. “I'm not your little anything, I'm not a child” (§8:107).

When Rheya tries to question Kelvin about her situation, Kelvin denies her information, seeing her alternately as a monster to be feared and a child/woman in need of protection. Responding to Kelvin's failure of understanding, Rheya becomes reflective; she turns inward; and as she does, she gains in subjectivity and is able to take more independent action, such as listening to a tape recording about the nature of the Phi creatures left by a now-deceased member of the space station crew. She realizes that she is not “the real Rheya,” that she may be looking out of her eyes with the eyes of the Ocean, her creator. The question of the intentionality of her gaze becomes problematic for her. At this point, she deliberately turns her gaze inward, potentially denying the Ocean its experiential window on the space station, stopping the flow of information, of which she may be the transmitter.

The change in Rheya's behavior was obvious, yet I could not define it. She did not meet my eyes, and was frequently so lost in thought that she did not hear me. Once, when she looked up, her cheeks were damp.

“Is anything the matter? You're crying.”

“Leave me alone,” Rheya blurted. “They aren't real tears.”

(§9:135)

The holding back of her self, although painful, allows her to take more independent actions, to spy on the astronauts, to overhear conversations of which she is the object, to research herself. This process of self-study, in which she is both subject and object, results in her increased understanding of her multiple origins. At the same time, she also begins to actively prevent Kelvin from accessing her growing interiority, her subjectivity. She lies to him about her researches, breaks off important communications, and hides her knowledge that he is lying to her about what he knows concerning the Phi creatures. This separation, akin to a period of politically motivated separatism, eventually leads Rheya to conclude that she is unitarily neither a tool, a human, nor a simulacra of Rheya, but a fourth thing that combines all of these identities. It is this fourth thing, this fourth subject, that Rheya, like the daemon who insists on both his humanity and his monstrosity, eventually challenges Kelvin to see.

3.2. Human/non-human/biological entity/machine. It is a commonplace that cultural narratives of colonization take as their starting point the deficiencies or monstrosities of the colonized body. The female body is the particular ground for scientific colonizings that seek to gain dominion over the processes of life. It is not surprising then, given the above, that in Solaris, the archetypal figure of the colonized is female.

Rheya is multiply “othered.” She is a product of Kelvin's mind: familiar and simultaneously truly alien. She is a biological entity, warm and pulsing, yet she is a technological product. Kelvin experiences Rheya's body with a combination of desire, disgust, and horror that is causally linked to her physical attributes, her “difference.” After Rheya displays her inhuman strength for the first time, Kelvin says, “I was no longer under any illusion: this was not Rheya—and yet I recognized her every habitual gesture. Horror gripped me by the throat …” (§5:60). This horror of Rheya's alien body is coupled with an urge to violence brought on at the moment when Kelvin is forced to experience Rheya as human and alien at the same time.

Rheya leaned her elbows on my knees and looked me in the eyes. I put out my hand and stroked her arms, her shoulders and the base of her bare neck, which pulsed beneath my fingers. While it looked as though I was caressing her (and indeed, judging by her expression, that was how she interpreted the touch of my hands) in reality I was verifying once again that her body was warm to the touch, an ordinary human body, with muscles, bones, joints. Gazing calmly into her eyes, I felt a hideous desire to tighten my grip.

(§5:62)

In this passage, Kelvin moves swiftly from the language of sexual desire, to the language of scientific appropriation, to the language of violence. What moves him through these stages? At first, he cannot help but see Rheya as woman, remarking on her “bare neck” and pulse. Then he switches, or tries to switch, to the language of the scientific method. But he cannot reconcile Rheya as woman-object and Rheya as alien-object. Later, when Snow suggests a method for “disintegrating” the visitors, Kelvin wonders what he will see at the moment of Rheya's disintegration. “What? A monster, a demon?” (§ 10:153). His urge to violence stems from the sensation that he is being tricked, that Rheya's ordinary body houses a monster, that she is unclassifiable.

Following this scene, Kelvin does in fact try to kill Rheya by blasting her into space in a shuttle craft. Now he says, “I felt I was justified in thinking that I had defeated the ‘simulacra,’ and that behind the illusion, contrary to all expectation, I had found the real Rheya again—the Rheya of my memories …” (§5:65). The simulacrum is too confusing, mirroring as it does his memories, while being composed of alien materials, and potentially lending itself to alien purposes. By killing the alien's rendition of Rheya and replacing it with his own, he has replaced one simulacrum with another; yet it is another with which he feels more comfortable because it is ontologically uncomplicated and all his own.

After the Ocean creates a new Rheya to replace the one killed by Kelvin, the scientists begin planning how to kill off all the “visitors.” Under the guise of scientific inquiry, Kelvin undertakes a physical examination of Rheya for the purpose of investigating ways to permanently kill her. He finds that Rheya's body is made of neutrinos, that she is “a super-copy, a reproduction which is superior to the original” (§7:101). This is the sign that she is not only alien, but also a technologically advanced machine. Furthermore, Rheya's dual aspect as a tool of the Ocean and a projection of Kelvin's mind results in her being compelled to remain physically near to Kelvin. In an early scene, Kelvin attempts to lock her in the bathroom, but she walks through the wall, breaking it down with frightening force. Not only her physical form, but her physical existence, seems to be entirely determined by her relationship to her two signifying entities.

As Rheya begins to recognize her dual imprisonment, she resists by forcing herself to remain apart from Kelvin, a process of physical separation that makes her ill.

All at once I noticed that Rheya was not with me. Then she reappeared; she had been hanging back in the corridor. In spite of the pain she suffered when she could not see me, she had been trying to keep away. I should have been astonished: instead, I went on acting as if I had been offended—but then, who had offended me?—and sulking like a child.

(§9:136)

Here, Lem outlines Kelvin's deliberate rewriting. Kelvin first acknowledges his astonishment that Rheya has succeeded in altering the terms of her existence, but then he determinedly recasts the scene in the male-female, fatherchild terms with which he is more familiar, and within which, more powerful. Kelvin's deliberate misdirection underscores Rheya's true destination: autonomy. Furthermore, the scene of physical separation is situated between one in which Rheya lies to Kelvin about her self-researches and a scene immediately following in which Rheya demands that Kelvin tell her what he knows about her nature and origins. By ordering events in this manner, Lem invites Rheya's attempt at physical separation to be read as one step in a series of steps that occur in spite of, or at times in reaction to, Kelvin's deliberate failures, failures which amount to his unwillingness to give up his hegemonic reading practices even when confronted with obvious counter-readings.

[Rheya] “I want to talk.”

[Kelvin] “All right, I'm listening.”

“Not like this.”

“What? You know I have a head-ache, and that's not the least of my worries …”

“You're not being fair.”

I forced myself to smile; it must have been a poor imitation: “Go ahead and talk, darling, please.”

“Will you tell me the truth?”

(137)

At this point, Kelvin's deliberate failure of understanding has become intolerable to Rheya and to the reader. Furthermore, Lem playfully reveals, in language usually reserved for stereotypical scenes of sex avoidance, what we have strongly suspected all along—that Kelvin's willful denial of Rheya's personhood reflects his need to avert the intimacy of a true encounter, an encounter that can only be achieved when the processes of naming, fixing, and defining have been shut down.

Rheya manages to physically separate herself from Kelvin for increasing periods of time, but she recognizes that merely acting autonomous does not make her so, nor significantly change her status vis-à-vis the Ocean. Her body is irreparably marked. In frustration, Rheya tries to kill herself by ingesting liquid oxygen, but because she is a simulacrum, she cannot die via means that are available to her only as a biological and not also as a technological product. After she revives, Rheya casts her frustration in light of her inability to write. She describes to Kelvin how she had tried to write in order to discover who she was. “But I couldn't write anything. I searched myself for … you know, some sign of ‘influence’ … I was going mad. I felt as if there was nobody underneath my skin and there was something else instead: as if I was just an illusion meant to mislead you” (§9:143). This attempt to write is an effort to signify herself, to find somebody underneath her skin. A second attempt at writing marks the measure of Rheya's success at the end of the novel.

Although painful, it appears that Rheya's desperate attempt to take charge of her body, even by dying, has enhanced her personhood. She is now able to recognize that Kelvin does not know any more than she does about her vexed origins: they are, epistemologically, on equal terms. She directly confronts him with her knowledge that she is not the original Rheya and goes on to tell him that she has heard the tape recording describing the Phi creatures as alien tools of the alien Ocean. In effect, she “comes out” to Kelvin after a period of self-discovery. The chapter ends with Rheya being able to discuss Kelvin's wife Rheya as a person other than herself. Having begun to come into her own separate subjectivity, she asks of Kelvin that he recognize her as a new, distinct entity: “you won't forget that I am the one who is here, not her [the original Rheya]” (§9:146).

Rheya reaches this point in her struggle for autonomy via a chain of responses one might associate with people in many kinds of independence movements: outrage, despair, withdrawal, physical separation, and insistence on ultimate control of the body. And she does finally “get control of her body.” The scientists devise an aptly named “destabilizing” machine that they believe will dissolve the neutrino fields of which the visitors are composed. Kelvin, still attempting to resolve his confusion about Rheya's ontological status, engages in an elaborate, willful game in which he pretends that she is human and that they might “return” to earth together. But his participation is desultory, as he is coming to recognize the inadequacy of his own reading of her: the gaze is wavering; he is beginning to catch himself in the act. It is unclear at this point whether he will commit himself to “killing” the visitors, whether he wants to be rid of Rheya, or whether he might accept her, as she has insisted, as a distinct new self. Kelvin never gets the chance to make this life-or-death decision for Rheya. In a reversal of an earlier scene in which he drugged Rheya, now Rheya drugs him and solicits Snow's assistance in deliberately submitting herself to the destabilizer's destructive rays.

In speaking of Rheya's destabilization and disappearance from the text, Istvan Csiscery-Ronay Jr. points out that “Rheya is an emergent being, both in political terms, and in Lem's evolutionary terms. There is no language for her yet, so she cannot occupy the discursive space.”¹¹ I would amend this to say that there is, finally, a narrow, inaugural space into which Rheya inserts herself decisively. In the course of planning to present herself to the destabilizer, Rheya has become able to write. Before she exits the text, she leaves Kelvin a note: an act which marks her final passage out of his control. Unless we are to suspect Kelvin of the outright misrepresentation of Rheya's written words, which I don't believe Lem intends, Rheya's note stands as her only unmediated communication, or at a minimum, a less mediated communication. Unlike Shelley's daemon, who never gets to speak except through his interpreters, Rheya has finally managed to insert her own words into the master narrative. Her note is reproduced in italics, set off from the body of the text.

My darling, I was the one who asked him. He is a good man. I am sorry I had to lie to you. I beg you to give me this one wish—hear him out, and do nothing to harm yourself. You have been marvellous.

(§13:190)

In the first sentence, Rheya claims agency in the matter of her own dissolution. It is she who has directed Snow to turn the destabilizer on her. Snow and the destabilizer, the man and his machine, have become her instruments. Next, Rheya asks that Kelvin listen to his fellow scientist. Throughout, Snow has insisted on confronting the alienness of the alien; he has recognized Kelvin's animosity toward the aspects of Rheya, and of the Ocean, which seem cruelly and immutably to refute Kelvin's anthropomorphic version of reality. In effect, as Rheya herself comes into the text, she asks Kelvin to cease “authoring” the alien. Her caution to Kelvin that he should “do nothing to harm [himself]” hints at her recognition that her death may not free him, and that it is he who has been dependent on “Rheya being Rheya” all along. Her note ends with the words “You have been marvellous,” the patronizing tone marking her understanding that in some sense, like Frankenstein, Kelvin has been seeking his creature's acquiescence to his authorial performance. Then, spectacularly, Kelvin reports, “There was one more word, which she had crossed out, but I could see that she had signed ‘Rheya’” (§13:190). Here, with one incomplete erasure, Rheya performs what she has been moving towards throughout the narrative. The original Rheyas are both erased and visible, existing in combination with the new entity, nameless, or needing none. Rheya's “death” serves as a performance of her claim to multiple identities: she escapes both the literal text, written by Kelvin, and the text of her oversignified self, written by the Ocean.¹²

Rheya's journey towards subjectivity coincides with a rapprochement of sorts between Kelvin and the Ocean. This rapprochement is figured in two scenes reminiscent of Slothrop's loss of the albatross of the self and dissolution into his surroundings in Gravity's Rainbow (626). In the first scene, before Rheya destabilizes herself out of the text, Kelvin dreams that he is both the object of an alien touch and the creator of new life; he comes to see himself as part of a continuum in which he is not compelled to choose either the subject or the object position; where the “prison” of the gaze from nowhere is opened from the outside. Yet this vision, which Kelvin terms “a state of true perception,” also occasions horror.

Out of the enveloping pink mist, an invisible object emerges, and touches me. Inert, locked in the alien matter that encloses me, I can neither retreat nor turn away, and still I am being touched, my prison is being probed, and I feel this contact like a hand, and the hand recreates me. … And recreated, I in my turn create: a face appears before me that I have never seen until now, at once mysterious and known. … I am infinite, and I howl soundlessly, begging for death and for an end. But simultaneously I am dispersed in all directions, and my grief expands in a suffering more acute than any waking state, a pervasive, scattered pain piercing the distant blacks and reds, hard as rock and ever-increasing, a mountain of grief visible in the dazzling light of another world.

(§12:179)

Here, Kelvin dreams of reciprocity, of being creature and creator. But this relinquishing of an either/or identity is experienced as a loss of ground, a dispersal that happens when this unitary male scientist exposes himself to the “dazzling light of another world.”

Later, after Rheya disintegrates, Kelvin travels alone to an island on the surface of the Ocean and proffers his hand, allowing himself to touch and be touched. Reciprocity finally comes.

A flower had grown out of the Ocean, and its calyx was moulded to my fingers. … I felt somehow changed. … sat unseeing, and sank into a universe of inertia, glided down an irresistible slope and identified my self with the dumb, fluid colossus; it was as if I had forgiven it everything, without the slightest effort of word or thought.

(§14:203)

His meaning-making apparatus at least temporarily overwhelmed, Kelvin has, in a sense, relinquished authorship. He has stopped seeing, writing, or even thinking. He has, at least momentarily, ceased representing.

Although Philmus sees Rheya's destabilization as a consciously chosen act, he also claims that Rheya's action “frees Kelvin from the bondage of guilt,” that her disappearance is a “self-sacrifice” (186–187) which enables Kelvin to then make his tenuous connection with the Ocean. I would claim that rather than being “freed,” Kelvin is merely left, and that his approach to the Ocean is the result of the continual failure of his own meaning-making apparatus, the apparatus of hegemonic, masculinist science. In the parlance of today, he bottoms out. His rapprochement brings little relief: it is the somewhat bitter, somewhat angry capitulation of someone who simply has nowhere else to turn, as his final words by the shores of the Ocean attest. “I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past” (§14:204). Rheya does provide partial provocation for Kelvin's failures of understanding, and thus for his final resort to an encounter with the Ocean, as she moves towards subjectivity, as she decolonizes herself by refusing the signification of the master and claiming herself as an agent of multiple identities. But although we might hope, and Lem seems to believe, that the liberation of the colonized must in some way liberate the oppressor, even if just by dethroning him, Rheya does not die to free Kelvin, but to destabilize the caricaturish, grotesque identities that he and the Ocean have devised as her prison. In other words, the “self” that she “sacrifices” is that which she must, in the novel's terms, rid herself of in order to become free. In an important sense, because Rheya is constructed by Lem to enact the “freedom or the nonfreedom of the programmed mind,” her narrative task is the opposite of Kelvin's. Rheya must throw off oversignification so that she might assume authorship, thereby escaping the bounds which Kelvin, the Ocean, and the text have set for her, including the limitation of being coded as a “sacrificial woman.” Kelvin, on the other hand, must relinquish authorship, giving up representational control, in order to escape from his “prison.” The forward motion of these two narratives is catalyzed by their interaction, the interaction of colonizer with the colonized, but the outcomes of each belong strictly to their distinct protagonists.

4. Conclusion: Liberation from the Margins. Kelvin decides not to leave Solaris. Now that Rheya, his mirror, is gone, he admits that he knows nothing, hopes for nothing, yet he holds out an open-ended expectation that in this place, here by the alien shore, the human race might begin to learn how not to “repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox …” (§14:204).

“Never again” has become the rallying call for some of us survivors of this hackneyed tune. Evidence that Lem is such a survivor may be found in his essay, “Reflections on My Life.” In it, Lem says that “every human being is able to write several strikingly different autobiographies, according to the viewpoint chosen and the principle of selection” (Microworlds 9). The recognition that one person might have multiple autobiographies bespeaks the experience of one who has lived in different worlds simultaneously. Lem's father spent five years as a Russian prisoner during the First World War. Lem's ancestors were Jewish, but he began to see himself as Jewish only when a Jewish identity was thrust upon him during the Nazi occupation of his native Poland. The son of a wealthy physician, he lacked no luxuries during his childhood but lived with the “overlying strata of war, of mass murder and extermination, of the nights in the shelters during air raids, of an existence under a false identity, of hide-and-seek” (Microworlds 9). One way of looking at Solaris is as an invitation: an invitation to come and inhabit this place of multiple identities, of survival, of both extreme creativity, and extreme cruelty. Here, colonizers like Kelvin might begin to entertain the possibility that by entering the world of aliens, Jews, women, and other colonized peoples, they might find a ground, not to assimilate the Other into the Same, but where, as Bell Hooks has written, the marginalized “greet you as liberators” (343).

“The margin,” Bell Hooks says, is “a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonized/colonizers” (342). Modern SF monsters regularly travel back and forth between the center and the margin, between hegemonic culture and their own, while the colonizer-scientists generally stay put, suffering from limited viewpoints as a result. Rheya is just such a monster, one who refuses both assimilation and ghettoization. She rejects the search for authenticity and the Western narrative of redemption, which, as Kelvin tells us, is the cornerstone of “the myth of the Mission of Mankind” (§11:173). Rheya liberates by breaking down the masculinist, Cartesian frame of reference and proffering an experience of unboundaried identities and fluid reciprocities. Like Lem, she inhabits—and insists on her right to inhabit—many worlds.

Today, our resisting monsters speak out from oppositional SF narratives alongside our most eloquent scientists. Like Rheya, Evelyn Fox Keller tells us that “The notion of control or domination that's at work is a fantasy. The world is not available to domination—I mean long-term domination. I think that's true politically as well as in the natural world” (118). As evidence of this, Keller acknowledges that women and other marginalized people are successfully interrupting and resisting science's project of domination. “It comes back to the question of who is the subject here. And the subject is beginning to disintegrate. The univocal masculinist subject is beginning itself to disintegrate” (125). Rheya and our other SF monsters—our constructed beings, aliens, and human thinkers—are participating in that breakdown precisely because, together, they defy the colonialist-scientist's claim to power over nature and nations by enacting the constitutive nature of relationships among all the agents of our world.

Notes

1. An SF in-joke. Cf The Borg, from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

2. In his recent SFS article, Eric White discusses both 19th-century and 20th-century cultural responses to evolutionary theory. Invoking Kristeva's formulation of “abjection,” White shows how 19th-century horror at identity disturbances occasioned by the blurring of binary categories such as “Man” and “animal” has evolved in some contemporary SF, particularly in the work of Octavia Butler, into an “erotics of becoming” (407). White's more psychoanalytic approach provides a different perspective on some of the issues I discuss in this essay.

3. This quest is typified by the following passage from B. C. Crandall, a science writer and VP of a California software company. Speaking of the potentials of nanotechnology, Crandall claims, “We must now face the unprecedented challenge of molecular engineering. We are called upon to direct not only our own evolution but the life force of an entire planet” (80). Crandall, who envisions future relationships of “compassion and understanding” (80) with other species and even our own technological products, nevertheless speaks the language of the benevolent dictator. Humans are the caretakers; science will literally constitute life, one imagines without women or with women as carefully tended tools, and the three-way relationship of human, animal, and machine remains hierarchical.

4. For my formulation of “resisting monsters,” I owe a big debt to Donna Haraway's groundbreaking work, especially “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” and “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.”

5. I make the claim that Frankenstein's daemon moves towards liberation because of the following: he gets rid of his masters; he reverses the scientific gaze and manifests his own subjectivity through language acquisition; he never stops insisting on his “humanity”; and he escapes from a narrative in which he can speak only through intermediaries.

6. Homi K. Bhabha describes Charles Temple's The Native Races and Their Rulers, published in 1918, a work which promulgated this brand of social Darwinism: “[subject races] are not merely degenerate and primitive but, Temple claims, they also require the ‘abnormality’ of imperialist intervention to hasten the process of natural selection” (76).

7. See Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought, especially chapter eight.

8. Think of illegal toxic dumping in Third World nations.

9. Lem's definition foreshadows current broadenings of the concept of the “colonized” articulated, for instance, by Edward Said who says “‘the colonized’ has since expanded considerably to include women, subjugated and oppressed classes, national minorities, and even marginalized or incorporated academic subspecialties” (207).

10. To say that Lem's use of female figures of colonization is deliberate would be overstating the case. By his own admission, Lem's choice of the female gender for the heroine of Solaris was involuntary, or at least not fully understood by himself. Jo Alyson Parker quotes a 1979 interview in which Lem refers to the heroines of both Solaris and a short story, “The Mask”: “I'm also not sure why I was interested in precisely a woman, and not in a man or some neutral gender—which is a much more frequent occurrence in my writings. Not only can I not explain this to others but I am unable to explain it to myself” (188). Clues to Lem's choice might be found in two places: the words of another character in Solaris, the scientist Snow, and in Lem's own autobiography. First, in Solaris, Snow hypothesizes that in creating Rheya, the Ocean looked into Kelvin's mind and “removed the deepest, most isolated imprint, the most assimilated structure …” (§13:193). That imprint figures Rheya as wife, as self-sacrificing woman, and as subjugate, i. e., as a “programmed mind.” Second, in his brief autobiography in Microworlds, Lem says of his early glimpses of female genitals, “The female pubis struck me especially—as something spiderlike, not quite nauseating but certainly something that could hardly have a connection with erotic feelings. … The thought that a male may be highly excited by the mere sight of female genitalia strikes me as very peculiar” (6). Although Lem has “authored” Rheya, he has done so partially in the manner of Kelvin, without recognizing the extent to which he has programmed her along the lines of his own “most assimilated structures,” structures which dictate that women, and not men, embody the most fully appropriated/colonized others, and the spiderlike, or inherently alien.

11. Private e-mail correspondence. September 29, 1993.

12. I don't mean to suggest that all liberation movements end in the attempted suicides of their participants. Liberation movements do usually involve freeing the body from various forms of slavery, forced work, and colonization, e. g., compulsory sex, rape, compulsory heterosexuality, slave or unwaged labor, limitations on travel, housing, employment, medical care, etc. I would contend, as food for thought, that all forms of oppression are ultimately based on control of the body via superior strength, be it physical strength or military might or both.

13. For comments and critical feedback at various stages of writing this, thanks to Madeleine Kahn, Mills College, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, DePauw University.

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