We're Flying High

To most thinkers the social realm is some other planet. Not so Stanislaw Lem, who, like all the great writers, is anchored to spaceship earth. In ground station control he stuffs a Marxist coterie inside a rocket, and blasts them into another galaxy, where they’ll confront the metaphysical mysteries behind their beliefs. Solaris.

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Allegory. The word frightens the artist, who wants the value of his work to be the work itself. An allegorical reading looking out from the piece rather going into it; the most important details belonging not to the novel but to politics, religion, the Freudian psychodrama. London Fields not a domestic garden, with its daisy sprinkled lawn, cherry trees and box hedges, the cat sleeping amongst the wisteria, but a road sign pointing to London, Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tracey Emin shag-show by the Thames. Allegory. What the…! Mr Sagely throws it on the floor, and kicks it to a pulp. You f***ing c**t! and chucks it out of the window.

Dr Derrière walks by. The word just missing her, she looks up at a face giving her the finger: f*** you, lady, it shouts; slamming the window down. Shocked, she looks at her feet and sees a book lying on the ground. She bends and picks it up; then stands, a rock in a commuting stream, the pedestrians swirling and curling around her, to read it. What an idiot! shouts some labourer in a high-vis jacket. To avoid trouble I try to circle around this tiny woman, a fencepost in a flooded field. A crowd of school-kids rushes off a bus creating a human wave that knocks me against…oh, its Dr Derrière! So sorry! stumbling into the book she raises as a shield. She smells funny - a little stale, mouldy, old age and old cigars - the smell…she looks up and twitches with uncertainty…it is the smell…oh, oh, yes, that’s all right, giving me a weak smile, then looking again at the book…the smell of that rancid bookshop in St Benedicts, half a century of rotting scholars, their superannuated tomes…. What ya doin’ luv! Shouts the workman. Can’t ya see there’s a crowd ‘ere. As she’s barricading my way, I give a gentle push and nod to move on. Confused, she starts to say something, when the crowd surges forward, pushing me hard against her, propelling us both along the pavement. Losing her balance she drops the book, which an army of feet marches to pieces. Yards down the street, and now free of the crowd, I hear a shout and turn around. It is that workman, standing like a sergeant major after his battalion has left the parade ground. He holds up a dirtied page: f***ing toilet paper, that is. He rubs it against his arse. Stupid bitch! Giving two fingers to a passing cyclist.

Allegory! Professor Parch shouts in triumph. He thinks he has caught me out. No, no, it is metaphor, I reply. He gets the Oxford English Dictionary down and quotes it. I crown him with Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Down he goes! a skirt off a prostitute’s thighs. Proud of myself I repeat the phrase out loud, as he lies moaning on the floor. It’s a metaphor! I throw my words down: dried peas on an angry headache. Metaphors. They are bloody metaphors!

Doctor Derrière looks in, to make sure if everything is all right. I heard a scream…. Parch motions her away; and I walk back with her to a breeze-block cell, one wall lined with books. Lacan hangs on the back of her study door. Giraffe legs, black mini-skirt, and two inter-ballistic missiles for nipples. As I look at this poster Dr Derrière returns with the coffee. Ah! I see you like my exquisite corpse. I mutter something about Gravity’s Rainbow; you know, the Picador cover…. She looks at me as if I’m a pervert. So what happened? I explain my tête-à-tête with Parch. Yes yes yes, allegory is extremely important. It is our lifeblood you know. No English department could survive without it. How much is there to be said about style and characters and mise en scène? How is each new generation of academics going to say something original about Tom Jones or Nicholas Nickleby? Unless we read back into them our own society, that ever-changing scene, the field will quickly exhaust itself. Thousands of academics growing the same crop, but without any allegorical manure. Imagine it! She laughs beautifully. We’d end up as school teachers. How dull, my dear, how dull! I know, I know, this allegory stuff is all about us. But why not! Think of the scholastics. Without all that allegorical reading they’d have been out of a job, and what would have happened to the universities then? No science my dear, no science at all. So yes, in our line of work allegory is essential to our salary and pension plan, which keeps the economy going, so helping the workers, who build our loft extensions and water the busy Lizzies. It has other uses. It educates the young not to believe in the imagination. Facts is what we want nowadays, not any of those silly old fictions. Dangerously immature to take these works too seriously. I hadn’t expected this, and am amazed. I mention Solaris. She is delighted. Yes, it has infinite possibilities…. Come come come…. She almost pushes me into a battered armchair. Taking off her cardigan, she throws it on a pile of books; then walks to her desk and looks out of the window. Turning around, she sits on a wooden chair and crossing her legs tells me about Communism and the Catholic Church; how the novel is a political parable, whose inspiration is the country’s Christian resistance.

This is unfair to Lem. His work is far richer than a simple symbolic tract. This is not The Yawning Heights, an operational manual for the Soviet Union, which tediously tells us to turn the On button on, or the machine will not work. The dullest novel ever translated. Such is Solaris’ quality, its argumentative suggestiveness, its descriptive brilliance - Lem’s pictures hang in the mind’s gallery - that it rises above any allegorical reading; to leave us with the metaphoric satisfactions of art. Metaphor, Professor Parch. Metaphor puts magic into a phrase, it is language’s abracadabra. Clarifying but also penetrating the thing it describes to give us a miraculous simulacrum of the real. Metaphor creating its own life under our reading eyes.1 Literature’s microscope.

Grabbing a stepladder I hurry on down to Speakers’ Corner.

I want to tell you about a masterpiece. Yes you madam, and you sir. It is from that land of lost causes: Poland. Poland, sir, they have writers too. The author’s name, it sounds like some kind of robot, so strange, so marvellous is it.…  Not lemons sir. Lem. What, you want me to spell out the name? Nincompoops, sir, I am surrounded by nincompoops. Don’t they collect the trash around here…. I was not being offensive my good woman. I was merely commenting on the litter I see all around me. L. E. M. Lem. Have you caught it now sir. I lob the name into the air. It is a novel. No no no, hey, you. Yes, you. Come back. Now! Turning your back on Gibarian and Snow; how do you think they feel? Characters hurt too, you know. Lem has written a novel…. What’s it called? You want to know what’s it’s called! Haven’t you got Google sir?… Solaris, it is called Solaris. A brilliant work of philosophy; yes my good lady, philosophy. This book, it is extremely important, it is life-changing sir, this book, it shows that science is our religion. Yes, a religion, madam, that hides itself under an assumed name. That white laboratory coat is actually a surplice. We are not sending our children to universities, sir; no, we are sending them to chapels and churches, even cathedrals. It’s as true as I stand on these steps. Solaris. It is the Bible for our times, written by a Pole, whose language nobody speaks.…I hang my head down, as in mourning…. What! A self-help book! Look here my good man. All works of philosophy are there to help the self. Read the right books, like this one here, and anyone can be a Carl Jung. Self-help! What is reading? Books, my good fellow, are nurses of the soul. I whack Solaris against my hip. Tough as any ward matron. Sorry, miss, I didn’t mean to be rude. Metaphors, you know, can get out of control; suddenly the horse is wild and we are hurtling across the fields….What sir? You want to look at the cover? Here it is…. Can’t see it! Come closer then…. The greatest name in philosophy. No! No! my friends, it is not Alan D. Bottom. There will be no cruelty or third rate philosophers here. Lem, Stanislaw Lem. The greatest appellation in European literature.

As with all profound work Solaris changes with the times; we see it differently after the fall of the Wall, with its Marxist mosaics splintering into dust. Today it is not nurture but nature that holds the mysteries we wish to solve and manipulate; though at the outer reaches of research - in the deepest darkest physics - it seems we’ll never go beyond our theories; our conceptual universe a frontier we cannot cross; the human mind its own border guard. Stuck forever in Koenigsberg with Immanuel Kant. It was very different in the 1970s, when it was believed that even time and space, those fundamental categories, were shaped by culture. We were not created by God but in the Garden of Eden, in the relationship between Adam and Eve; thrust out into the world through the thighs of society. Amongst Marxists such ideas took on a peculiar form: History was our phylogenesis. History the great ontological question, because it determined a human’s truest nature: its level of civilisation.2 Not biology. Not even the social matrix. No. For the bien pensant Marxist Man was a product of Time.

Either way the responsibility lies with History, not men, and old Communists can sleep easy. This retroactive determinism is nothing but Whig History plus dialectics. (Tony Judt quoted in David Kynaston’s review of R.J Evans’ biography of Eric Hobsbawm).

History would save us! Though, as Judt suggests, this History was suffused with a mysticism, that only an adept could touch. History, it was thought, had its own laws that could be discovered by a strange science - dialectics, Marxism’s alchemy - one closer to medieval scholasticism that modern chemistry.3 In the Communist East (and in Paris, France) the heavens of ethics was deemed more important than the metaphysics of the universe: the salvation of Man the task of epistemology. Communism a Catholicism for the modern age. And they had found the truth! Alas, it was illusion, which by Lem’s time had become a complete fantasy. An ideological movement, when it reaches the limits of discovery, the borders of its own territory, is apt to retreat to the fortress of established doctrine, which it defends against local bandits and aliens from other lands. Its task to preserve itself as a tradition, confirming, justifying and elucidating it to a captive audience, unable to leave its fortress walls. Content to map the known terrain, never to explore a new continent, whose influences might threaten its existence. Not to risk the influx of unknown tribes that, replete with their own fears and misunderstandings, are apt to tear down the building’s ornaments, break up its foundations, and cheer when the ancient cathedral collapses.4 Parch turns away to snigger into his hand. I slap him around the back of the head and knee him in the buttocks. To protect itself an ideological regime transmutes knowledge into a religion, turning ideas into beliefs. Beliefs that buttress the Church, that in turn preaches and policies them. Institution and epistemology have merged. 

The Communist East went further than the medieval Church. Since the Middle Ages the State had replaced the Church as the strongest institution in society. However, even though it controlled the Church in some countries, the State remained at a distance from its beliefs and religious practice. The Bolsheviks changed all this. A religious cult took over the State and turned it into a religious institution. The State had become its own religion. The consequences were not pleasant. God no longer an invisible entity on an impossible planet, but a local official ubiquitous at work, in school, on the street. In the 1960s he stepped inside the home, to smile from the TV set (only the kitchens were safe).5 The closeness of God, or to be precise, the proximity of his officials, was oppressive.6 If invisible and unknown we can ignore him or speculate about his existence to infinity. Our minds free to dress up the Omniscient One with the current fashion: we put Karl Marx in Christian Dior and parade him down the catwalk.7 Not so easy if security guards patrol the building. They confiscate and throw in the incinerator all that demeans the dignity of their employer. Inevitably we begin to identify God with these characters, boorish and obtuse. We question His legitimacy, we see cracks in His power, and find a means of widening them. Oh for another God! to free out minds again. One is usually waiting on the other side of the electric fence, his palm cupped to his ear listening to our prayers.… 

By the 1970s it was obvious even to the most orthodox of Marxists that History wasn’t so easily mastered. The stellar student who always follows the rules, and is happy to accept the drudgery of a bureaucratic career, as he slowly works his way through the committee rooms of the Party apparatus, to enter the Politburo just before he collects his pension, didn’t exist outside of the Communist Party.8 History, they had discovered, wasn’t so predictable after all. It was the classroom rebel. The perennial bad boy,9 who they could not control or properly understand. The cleverest apparatchiks began to order Karl Popper from Foyles.10

The salariat are rarely so sharp. Teaching in schools, working in Gosplan, administering the universities, even lecturing inside them, such characters readily accept the conventional wisdom, in Russia the religion of the State. Even in the 1970s, when it was clear that history was nothing but a common noun, many still kept using that capital H; inertia has its own momentum. 

In the West, rather than riding their mount to victory, the Marxists now found themselves thrown off a tired horse. Left in the mud, looking at their opponents racing past, how they railed against their lot! No longer celebrating History as the wise leader, they attacked it as a false idol; a creation of their opponents, who, following an historical coup d’état, were using it for nefarious purposes. Bastards!

This anonymity of the bourgeoisie…  France is steeped in this anonymous ideology… Yet it is through its ethic that the bourgeoisie pervaded France: practiced on a national scale, bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order… The fact of the bourgeoisie becomes absorbed into an amorphous universe, whose sole inhabitants is Eternal Man who is neither proletarian nor bourgeois.

The flight from the same ‘bourgeois’ is not therefore an illusory, accidental, secondary, natural or insignificant phenomenon: it is the bourgeois ideology itself, the process through which the bourgeoisie transforms the reality of the world into an image of the world, History into Nature. And this image has a remarkable feature: it is upside down. The status of the bourgeoisie is particular, historical: man as represented by it is universal, eternal. The bourgeois class has precisely built its power on technical, scientific progress, on an unlimited transformation of nature: bourgeois ideology yields in return an unchangeable nature. The first bourgeois philosophers pervaded the world with significations, subjected all things to an idea of the rational, and decreed that they were meant for man: bourgeois ideology is of the scientistic or the intuitive kind, it records facts or precise values, but refuses explanations; the order of the world can be seen as sufficient or ineffable, it is never seen as significant. Finally, the base idea of a perfectible mobile world, produces the inverse image of an unchanging humanity, characterised by an indefinite repetition of its identity. In a word, in the contemporary bourgeois society, the passage from the real to the ideological is defined as that from an anti-physis to a pseudo-physis. (Roland Barthes, Mythologies)11

History, with its own force, its own laws, even its own consciousness, determines the destiny of the human race. And once they were its proud owners! How confident and arrogant this made them. The Marxists professing not only to know the secrets of this unruly beast but to have the ability to tame it: Godzilla, caged in their power station, winds up the city’s dynamo. A professor of Historical Dialectics understands reality and therefore controls it. The teacher of ideas also a leader of men.12 An intoxicating cocktail, of which too many intellectuals drunk too much. The double promise of metaphysical grace and political power combined to produce an epidemic of alcoholism.

Then those bastards the Bourgeoisie stole their precious pet.

By the late 1950s - we feel the knees of Barthes wobbling - the confidence had gone. The future was not to be the great Communist paradise, built on a pure rational order that insures both prosperity and a civilised humanity.13 Marxism had gone the way of phrenology. Even worse, the hated rival - Capitalism - had domesticated the great beast; and quite literally: consumer capitalism was now Godzilla’s keeper, who entertained the punters at a private zoo. History was on business’ side! Though, such is the prejudice, these Marxists lacked the grace to admit defeat, arguing that it only appears that History has been subdued. That zoo a virtual reality, the animals holograms.

A friend is huffing and puffing. Look Schloss, Barthes is discussing ideology; he is describing how the material relations of Capitalism, through producing a dynamic reality (‘History’), creates a class who manufactures their own stable ideology, which they mistake for that reality (‘Nature’), a universal phenomenon. Marx was right. It’s just taking longer than he thought; the bourgeoisie prolonging the agony by creating these false fantasies. 

Thank you, Stan. Mr Stan Skypole, you explain Barthes better than Barthes himself. I have little doubt that he believes this is what he has written. Though I also hear him chuckling to himself as he plays with the ironies of dialectic, which, as Judt writes, can justify all things. Prove that Stalinism is a liberal creed? Turn nothing into something? Hopelessness into hope? Whip out the dialectic! and all is well.14 Ideas are reduced to valueless counters that, because they have no value, each one exactly the same, are completely interchangeable. Playing with words, until rinsed of meaning. ‘History’ to become ‘Nature’. How marvellously impressive; until we look behind the magician’s sleight of hand. Barthes cleverly reversing the ordinary meaning of these terms to prove an entirely arbitrary argument, whose assumptions rely on a private vocabulary, which we are to meekly accept. Submit to this dictator of the dictionary, who changes definitions the way Stalin changed doctrine? No, Skypole, no. Let’s climb up the lighthouse and look out over the horizon. What do we see? We can’t see Barthes for all the other academics, sailing their toy boats - the Bourgeois, Nature, History… - across the bay. All bought at Ray-If’s Vacation,15 that gaudy store down by the carpark. To Barthes and his ilk the world is a metaphysical stage on which ideas are the only actors. For a Barthes everything is ideas! The idea of the Bourgeois turns the idea of History into the idea of Nature. Never to leave the classroom of abstraction. Being his natural milieu Barthes doesn't see a problem here, because for him the world is idea. But those of us who live outside school, who must cross the road, who can’t afford to think of these passing cars as pure concepts…Stan slams his fist on the table. That’s below the belt Schloss. I wave his interjection away with a dandy’s insouciance. I can only hope, for Barthes’ sake, it was a bourgeois who was driving that car… Skypole grabs me by the collar and shakes me violently. So angry he cannot speak, his words melting into fury are a red hot lava engulfing his face; I wait for the smoke to leave his nostrils, the ashes to fall from his mouth…. William Hazlitt comes and carries me off this volcano’s trembling side.

When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine. Look through the dictionary, and cull out a florilegium, rival the tulippomania. Rouge high enough, and never mind the natural complexion. The vulgar, who are not in the secret, will admire the look of preternatural health and vigour; and the fashionable, who regard only appearances, will be delighted by the imposition. Keep to your sounding generalities, your tinkling phrases, and all will be well. Swell out an unmeaning truism to a perfect tympany of style. A thought, a distinction is the rock on which all this brittle cargo of verbiage splits at once. Such writers have merely verbal imaginations, that retain nothing but words. Or their puny thoughts have dragon-wings, all green and gold. (On Familiar Style, in Selected Writings)

Settling Stan at the kitchen table, where he nurses a mug of hot chocolate, I ask this question: is ‘History’ really ‘reality’ and “Nature the image of the world”? No. I will not countenance a game that turns the natural history of a billion human beings into a portfolio of caricatures. Barthes is playing with words, “imposing, vague, incomprehensible, magniloquent, a cento of sounding common-places”, to quote Hazlitt again. No, Stan, I have no interest in academic Scrabble. Detaching these grandiose concepts - Nature, History, Reality - from any substantive meaning, Barthes writes a pure metaphysics; a sign, I would suggest, that the Marxist belief in social transformation was by then over.16 Skypole whispers a groan. I ignore it with a cartoon snarl. Barthes almost admits it. But then pretends to keep the radical hope alive, by arguing that the bourgeoisie (why no capital for the enemy?) have a false image of the world; falsity implying exposure and collapse. The Real to always defeat the Unreal! That old nonsense, which his own analysis refutes: according to him the bourgeoisie have successfully made a fiction of the social universe; the unreal winning as usual. Academic am-dram; where Lenin dons Thatcher’s twinset; and Mrs T dresses up as Trotsky for the Tory party ball; though old Leon, I’m sure, didn’t wear silk stockings…. Skypole slams his mug down, and buries his head in his arms’ embrace. I hear some muffled phrases, questioning the legitimacy of my birth. I walk over and whisper into his ear: isn’t it strange how closely this depiction of bourgeois ideology resembles the Marxist promise of an enlightened paradise? And how close is this fiction to the then Soviet Union, which by the late 1950s had manufactured a stable ideology, largely accepted by its bourgeoisie? Stan gets up, and walks silently out of the room.

Marxism itself is responsible for these fantasies. It is there in its origins, in an intellectual’s attempt to impose a set of ideas upon the world.17 What began as an exercise in explaining reality, through the creation of a general theory, became a means of avoiding it, as the theory was substituted for that world.18 The idealism that informs the early Marx was always a danger to his acolytes, who were far more likely to follow his ideas than explore the reality these ideas tried to explain. This ideological conquest guaranteed when Marxism entered the universities. Barthes is the end of a line, the fag-end of a theoretical tradition, the disused subject in a collapsing paradigm: the moment when a theory has become so abstract it loses all meaning. The tea is cold. The kettle has no water in it. I look around. Stan Skypole has gone. A Lichtenstein stares at me from over the mantelpiece. Alone with a picture that seems to laugh in my face. 

What exactly is this bourgeoisie that turns a mobile reality into a fixed idea? The bourgeois historian interested in historical change?19 The bourgeois clerk frightened of nuclear war (the true end of history and nature)? Or the bourgeois scientist who studies evolution? Is it the bourgeois journalists who created the Angry Young Men, hoping they’d kick out the Establishment? Then there is the bourgeois Marxists, Barthes himself… Stan Skypole, listen to me….I put him back in the chair, remodel him as Sophia Loren, and flirt with her outrageously. In Barthes’ definition of the bourgeoisie none of these characters - the living breathing bourgeois - exist. Not even Barthes! A paradox I do like. Such ideas are not completely without use, of course; large abstractions heuristic tools that provide an intellectual framework to organise complex phenomena. Or to be less kind: they are the intellectuals’ zimmer frame. But that is all. I stroke Skypole on the head. She smiles up at me, charmingly. Yes, my girl, to truly understand the world such abstractions have to be used with finesse. We go below their surface, to look at their composition, those thousands of smaller ideas, the conceptual servants of some yeoman fact.20 Then there’s the intellectual history, the vast labour force who built these metaphysical pyramids.21 Again I quote Hazlitt: there are those of us “whose ‘ambition is more lowly’, pry a little too narrowly into nooks and corners” where we “pick up a number of ‘unconsidered trifles.’” Nooks and corners do not interest Barthes, though he pretends to like “unconsidered trifles”, his Mythologies. No. Barthes operates on a different scale. In some vast imperial hall, where he congas with Sartre & Co and blows the Hegelian bassoon.22 No commoners here. Not even in the portico, where only a princess can introduce her prince. While at the banqueting table, as Leibniz, creating a rumpus, elbows Newton in the gut, Barthes places a canapé slowly and delicately between Sontag’s opening lips. Yum yum, Rollie baby!

In the East the defects of Bolshevik thought were already obvious: its ideological tools fit only for the junk shop. History had moved too quickly for orthodox Marxism, which now smelt of the dust of a Victorian attic.23 The original theories were falling to pieces, eaten away by the termites of time.

The room was larger than mine. A curtain decorated with little pink and blue flowers (not regulation Station equipment, but no doubt brought from Earth with his personal belongings) covered three-quarters of the panoramic window. Around the walls were bookshelves and cupboards, painted pale green with silvery highlights. Both shelves and cupboards had been emptied of their contents, which were piled into heaps, among the furniture. At my feet, blocking the way, were two overturned trolleys buried beneath a heap of periodicals spilling out of bulging brief cases which had burst open. Books with their pages splayed out fanwise were stained with coloured liquids which had spilt from broken retorts and bottles with corroded stoppers, receptacles made of such thick glass that a single fall, even from a considerable height, could not have shattered them in such a way. Beneath the window lay an overturned desk, an angle poise lamp crumbled underneath it; two legs of an upturned stool were stuck in the half-open drawers. A flood of papers of every conceivable size swamped the floor…

The mission is in disarray. We are not at the beginning of a New Age, where marvellous hopes and glossy machinery create god-like illusions in mankind’s ability to fashion an extra-ordinary future. We are at the end of an adventure, where heroes, sunk deep in apathy and despair, have become the victims of their own dreams. Solaris has mashed its crew, who are reduced to the mad eccentric Sartorius and the drop-out Snow. Gibarian is dead; murdered by his nightmares. 

The Mystery will not yield. After decades of experimentation the Ocean remains impenetrable to human discovery. These explorers spin their theories, that lose all gravity, floating into myth and fairy tale. Trapped inside their own ideas that they now see - it is the mission’s failure, its terminal end - are unreal. The promise of a truly scientific understanding has gone. Failure overwhelms them, forcing a return to the self; its isolation and loneliness. Contemplating an entire life dedicated to an illusion depression and madness quickly follows. Gibarian will not surrender to his awful truth. In a desperate attempt to make contact with the Ocean, an organic mass with its inexplicable consciousness, he has the crew bombard it with X-rays. The Ocean defends itself by invading their minds. Gibarian dies. Sartorius retreats into eccentricity. Snow is voided of his wits. When the narrator lands phantoms stalk Solaris.

Nobody knows the reason for the Ocean’s reaction. Is it investigating these brutish, intrusive creatures? Revenge is it? A blind impulse, a pain lashing out…. Like the Ocean itself, the invasion, the phantoms it generates, their imaginary conquest, remains puzzling. The causes are not known, though the effects are terrifying: the Ocean, entering into the memories of each crew member, selects the one that causes the most agony, which it embodies in perfect material form. Rheya stands before the narrator, a mirage of skin and bone and the Polish language. Rheya, reborn to reincarnate her suicide, is a physical being wholly dependent upon the narrator’s thoughts; feeding off his memories, she only exists in his presence. An idea made flesh. A ghostly impossibility - only at the sub-atomic level is her inhumanity revealed - that rightly scares the hero, whose first reaction is to destroy a vision that is beyond his comprehension. How can an idea be a physical reality….

Rheya returns. Ideas are indestructible. Our narrator acknowledges this fact, accepting this simulacrum of the old Rheya. Soon he cannot make the distinction. It is Rheya! Only her memories of events occurring after her death suggesting otherwise. To live with phantoms as if they were actual people…it is a madness, the narrator takes for sanity. To us such behaviour seems inevitable, for these spacemen have been educated to think of abstractions as real things, living entities. The Ocean is playing with men trained to believe in its fictions.

The crew have projected their despair onto the Ocean, which in sending back their mistakes and regrets both reflects and magnifies them. The Future having become a hopeless enterprise, the Past returns and reclaims its lost rights. The promise of a fresh slate, a completely new beginning, ends with a history of this quest’s errors and destructiveness. These men to face the damage they’ve caused and left behind.

Thinking to grasp and therefore control Reality these scientists have brought back the primeval instincts that the original enlightening impulse sought to overcome. Our narrator is lucky. Rheya is a vision of that once beautiful future. Her return to engender a melancholy memory of those early days of epistemological innocence. Yes. The narrator is the maddest of the lot, thinking to return to an idealism that he believes has materialised for the first time.

The riddle of Rheya’s existence disturbs him. His initial reaction - it is the actions of a rational man - is to destroy a phenomenon which threatens his cosmology. You cannot kill a concept. Forced to accept her existence, a relationship develops, that resuscitates the old emotions. Soon he is falling in love with Rheya all over again, though he knows she is not human. After a while he doesn't care, doesn't seem to even notice. Do not be surprised Parch! Like any well-educated person he has no difficulty in accepting the reality of ideas. No. It is the idea that has difficulties; Rheya increasingly self-conscious about her own nature, her dependence upon this man. The more real she appears in the present the less real she becomes in the past, weakening a sense of a self grounded in the memories of actual events. The narrator is killing the old human Rheya with his love. New thoughts erasing the memories that once gave her life, until she is nothing but an idea inside his head, recreated each day anew. What an awful paradox! The more real she appears, the less so is she in fact. Then there is the problem of the idea, the idea of Rheya, created out of the original memories. As the relationship grows the realities of the present, this time on Solaris, crowds out the Rheya of pure thought, the concept Rheya. Both her material origins and her independent metaphysical existence are at risk. Feeling the loss of her essence, she despairs at her increasingly illusionary existence. And the narrator? He gives himself up to a dream. 

When Lem wrote Solaris Marxism had ceased to have any real meaning; while the society, playing at being Communist, had become an absurdist puppet show.

Both want the impossible: Rheya to be a human being. The tension between belief and the facts will not last long. That fairy tale of the idea turned flesh is but a holiday romance. The needs of the idea - to retain its abstract purity - and the demands of the body for desire and possession cannot be reconciled. For a brief moment a union seems possible. It does not last. Rheya unable to transcend her own conceptualism. The tension is too much, and the idea returns to the Ocean, its metaphysical home.

Parch throws the book aside, and berates me. Sci-fi! Genre fiction. Trash. Kids’ stuff. Allegories for clever adolescents…. On and on he goes. I squeeze his nose, and kick him in the knees. As he lies on the floor, crying out in pain, he calls me a middlebrow. That’s it! I call Lem. Together we carry Parch to the garden, and we stuff him in the recycle bin. Metaphor, you bastard! we shout in unison, slamming down the lid.

The past repeats itself, though not, as Marx would have it, as farce, but as a sad mysterious release from previous illusions (Freud has sneaked into the ship’s library) that in leaving us wiser creates the melancholy hope that the illusion will return. A belief is broken, but the will to belief remains.

I had never felt its gigantic presence so strongly, or its powerful changeless silence, or the secret force that gave the waves their regular rise and fall. I sat unseeing, and sank into a universe of inertia, glided down an irresistible slope and identified myself with the dumb, fluid colossus; it was as if I had forgiven it everything, without the slightest effort of word or thought…

That liquid giant had been the death of hundreds of men. The entire human race had tried in vain to establish even the most tenuous links with it, and it bore my weight without noticing me any more than it would notice a speck of dust. I did not believe that it could respond to the tragedy of two human beings. Yet its activities did have a purpose… True, I was not absolutely certain, but leaving would mean giving up a chance, perhaps an infinitesimal, one, perhaps only imaginary… Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still waited me. I knew nothing, and I resisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.

Never to know the Ocean. No matter. The dream that we might know in the future is enough to sustain him through his loss. He is to stay on Solaris, hoping to live again with its phantoms, glorious creations that excite the mind. Once he believed he had solved its mystery. Now he knows the solution was an invention of his own fancy. Once our narrator thought he had won the jackpot. Today he knows he read the numbers wrong. But some day…some day he’ll pick the big one in the epistemological lottery.

What is the Ocean? It is what Barthes calls History. Human civilisation and the cultures it generates; artificial creations having a life that is as real as…you, reader. Collective entities made up of beliefs, odd ideas, moral codes, and, most important this, a unique atmosphere; a metaphysical fortress impregnable to attack.24 Or so it seems. Yet how quickly the atmosphere dissipates, the ideas are lost, the belief fades away, when the culture loses its confidence.25 

Independent of all humans culture is yet wholly dependent upon each one, both for its production and its continuing existence. Parson Adams fathered by Fielding died when his author put down his pen. He was resurrected by the first readers who removed the rock from his cave…returning to his hardback heaven when they left Joseph on top of Fanny. Now he waits in his paperback coffin for our judgement day. Alive and dead. Distant and intimate. Abstract and concrete. Parson Adams lives; yet when we try to grasp this existence it crumbles at our touch…it is the same with culture.

Magic. To a dull scientist this is an illusion; illusion, my dear boy, illusion. For a bureaucrat it is a waste of time; or a pension plan.26 To the thinker, a true explorer - Gibarian - the mystery is too much, he is overwhelmed by the strangeness of the human mind, its thoughts and products. It is nothing but a symbol to a scholastic; literature a signpost to somewhere else: Christ’s Jerusalem or Marx’s Moscow.27

Our narrator doesn't know what to think. He lives on his feelings and with his hopes of an impossible future, Rheya’s return. He will make his home on Solaris, living amongst his thoughts and images, and feeding off memories of a real presence gone for good. 

Not History but what history creates - culture - is what really matters in this life. And yet being so fragile it is easily destroyed; that old git Parch one of the demolition crew. Few really care for culture. There is our narrator, for sure, but he is a sad and lonely fool. But we need him. A civilised society depends upon such characters, the quality of its civilisation determined by its tolerance of them. 

And the Ocean? It returns to itself, to leave a beautiful melancholy in those who recognise something bigger than ourselves. It has taught the lesson. The wise to write history in lower case.28

(Review: Solaris)

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1. There is an excellent discussion in A.S. Byatt’s Still Life / Nature morte in Selected Writings.

2. Supremely interesting comment on the effects of this idea in Eastern Europe is in Donald Sassoon’s The Culture of the Europeans. What the West regarded as authoritarian and intolerant was in fact - after the horrors of Stalinism - an attempt to improve the citizens, by encouraging them to engage with high culture. The prejudices of an intellectual class filtered through an inefficient bureaucracy that tried to actualise the ideal of a universal intelligentsia. A hopeless task.

3. The analogy is apt, if we substitute History for God as the motive force of the universe. A brilliant analysis of medieval thinking, revelatory when detailing the period’s multifarious conceptions of the deity, is Gordon’s Leff’s Medieval Thought.

4. A marvellous portrait of one such vandal is Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cranmer.

5. Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time.

6. This is the theme of Theodore Fontane’s Before the Storm: the German’s idealisation of French civilisation put under strain by the presence of French soldiers in German towns.

7. Though a negative critique José Merquior’s Western Marxism gives us a sense of his transformation.

8. Maxim Leo’s Red Love: The Story of an East German Family turns this metaphor into biography, whose author is a symbol of the regime. Professor Parch is pleased.

9. See Emmanuel Carrère’s extraordinary Limonov for a description of the Soviet underground.

10. The Poverty of Historicism. Oddly, the Marxist teleology immediately shifted to the Right; Fukuyama’s End of History thesis an attempt to maintain the Marxist illusion of a theoretically known and therefore manageable history. Supposedly writing about the future his thought - a weak Hegelianism - was trapped in the past. John Gray was more acute - False Dawn.

11. One of the (many) odd things about this passage, as with the book overall, is the author’s determination to turn the bourgeoisie into a myth; a myth he seems to believe is literally true (“natural” to his own terminology), despite his evident sophistication. 

For the orthodox Marxist History is the universal fact, the eternal problem. It is different for the French intellectual; for though suffused with Marxist thought the typical Parisian, cogitating on his own existential crisis - that bourgeois in the mirror - is obsessed with his own class. The bourgeoisie both History’s superstar and teleological endpoint. Thus in Barthes the Marxian promise of a universal communism, a world without history, is replaced by a bourgeois simulacrum: one class’s idea of paradise rather than its reality. The bastards: they have stolen our History! The bourgeoisie, an implacable force, Modernity’s ever-present devil. It is the perennial conflict inside a psyche brought up to be schizophrenic: a bourgeois trained to both value material success and to believe in ideas.

And they’re all Marxists? We shouldn’t be surprised. Marxism is a throughly bourgeois philosophy (read Robert Service’s Lenin); the reason it could so easily capture the Paris intellectual scene. The 1960s a battle between two sides of this class: the administrative and the academic (Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility). Barthes, typical of his university milieu, sides with the latter - thus the anti-capitalism - but is suffused with a counter-culturalism - its origins in the 1950s - that was to undermine the institutions of the state, facilitating the triumph of corporate capital (Harold Perkins, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880).

For perceptive comment on the early post-war period dominated by Communist enthusiasm see Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals 1944-1956. Judt makes a strong case that the decline of this enthusiasm began in the early 1950s, before the Hungary invasion, which merely confirmed it. Barthes an example of that shift towards a general radicalism where Marxism, losing all intellectual content, becomes merely a sign of one’s anti-bourgeois credentials. A Mao badge on a three-piece business suit.

12. This combination made Trotsky attractive to many. There was also the romanticism of the lost leader; the future that never was. His autobiography is marvellous - a true Russian classic. It is also revealing: the bourgeois upbringing and that appalling inhumanity.

13. With History on its deathbed a new God was being born: the Market squealing out between Margaret Thatcher’s legs.

14. Its complete vacuity is exposed by Will Self in his brilliant demolition of Žižek, who is shown to be a very poor sophist. See also my The Liberal Stalinist.

15. Reification. A good discussion of this academic addiction - every verb mangled into a noun - is Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly.

16. See Donald Sassoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism for the Western Left’s general acceptance of capitalism by the 1950s.

17. The intellectual lives outside ordinary existence, and is never able to hold on to its banalities for very long. The world seen in sharp brief snatches, then quickly forgotten. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Talking, talking, talking. She buys an ice-cream, which melts before she eats it…. Barbara Pym’s wonderful Jane and Prudence is a gentle but hilarious satire on such characters.

18. See Ernest Gellner’s Post-Modernism, Reason and Religion.

19. Two classics from the period. Frances A. Yates showing how a theory - the art of memory - evolved over two millennia. A.J.P. Taylor describing how the evolution of an international society was shaped by changing ideas and new material forces: the metaphysical threat of Germany and its increasing industrial power (The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918).

20. Nicely put by Partha Dasgupta in his interview with Alan Macfarlane.

21. The work of Quentin Skinner is exceptionally important here. See in particular his work on Machiavelli, whose The Prince is a dialogue with Cicero.

22. An excellent critique of Barthes can be found in José Merquior’s From Prague to Paris: Structuralist and Post-structuralist Itineraries.

23. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change.

24. Kafka is the master here. See in particular The Refusal and A Hunger Artist in The Complete Stories.

25. We get an acute sense of this loss of confidence when reading John Dunn’s Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future. It is this loss of atmosphere that Gibbon tries to capture when he posits Christianity as the causal factor in Rome’s fall (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).

26. For elaboration, see the James Kelman quote from “And the judges said…” in my Train Them Good.

27. There is more to literature than just the words. Too many scholars are oblivious to this truth.

[Cranmer] took a bleakly utilitarian view of a figure or metaphoric theological discussion: their metaphors were there to be quarried by the Church as a source of precise theological information. Gardiner, with his more showman-like feel for words, could come closer to seeing the point of poetic language: ‘no approved author hath this exclusive, to say an only sign, an only token, an only similitude, or an only signification’ when they use metaphorical speech. (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer)

28. It is a necessary part of the historical discipline in the periods before opinion pollsters that it leads to concentration on the particular, rather than the general. (Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509-1660).