Solaris Foreignness and the Other Quotes

This is when Snow first meets Kelvin. He's freaked out because he thinks Kelvin is a visitor, and confused because if Kelvin is a visitor, then Snow should know him (because he would have come from inside Snow's head). It's not clear if Snow is more frightened because Kelvin is unfamiliar, or because he worries that Kelvin will be familiar.

Kelvin's premonitions aren't especially reliable. Here he thinks there's someone in the room, but there isn't; it was just his own brain in there tricking him. Or… maybe he's sensing the psychic emanations of the alien ocean? Is he mistaking his own brain for an alien presence, or an alien presence for his own brain? Kelvin is a man of two minds.

This is the first visitor we see, and she's marked as "other" in numerous ways—she's black, she's a woman, she's dressed in non-Eurocentric style (topless and with a grass skirt). Alien-ness is presented in terms of race, gender, and culture. This could be a critique of the way sci-fi treats these issues, or it could just be a continuation of the way sci-fi treats these issues. Check out the "Symbolism" section for further discussion.

Rheya is an artificial person, so she has an artificial dress. The dress isn't real, which makes sense, since the dress is in fact not real—it's part of a story, which you're reading about. You can't put on the dress, just like Rheya can't. Lem is emphasizing the foreignness of the alien Rheya, but he's also slyly pointing out the foreignness of the character, Rheya. A character in a book might be considered a kind of alien, with whom you get to have a limited psychic content, even if you can't ultimately understand them.

Has Rheya really stopped sounding human? Or is Kelvin just seeing her as more inhuman now that he's shut her in the rocket and blasted her into space? Maybe foreignness is in the ear of the hearer—in how much humanity you're willing to grant someone else.

Berton sees a giant human baby in the ocean, but it doesn't look quite like a giant human baby, and he doesn't like it at all. This sounds something like the theory of the uncanny valley: the idea that people are revolted by human representations that look almost, but not quite, like human beings. The baby looks like an alien other is manipulating it; it's uncanny. Humans are okay, and aliens are okay, but an alien that looks almost like a human is uncanny. Run, do not walk, Berton. Giant evil-possessed baby critter is coming.

Rheya says Snow gave her a strange look—or perhaps a look that says that she is strange. Kelvin suggests it's a look of desire, emphasizing the difference between men and women, but Rheya thinks it's a look emphasizing another kind of difference. The parallel here seems important: Rheya is different because she's an alien, and being an alien is, for the novel, analogous to being a woman. Which raises the question—is Solaris the ocean a female or a male?

Kelvin is happy that Rheya is an alien other because this means she can't kill herself. Difference is also presumably part of the reason he loves her, since he's a heterosexual guy. Difference is good. But Solaris often suggests that difference doesn't exist. So that's bad. You can't win on Solaris, which is why no one has built a casino there (even though it would be a boost to the tourism industry).

Kelvin's Ph.D. implied that the Solaris ocean might have something analogous to human emotions. Headline writers loved the idea, and cheerfully anthropomorphized the ocean. Kelvin thinks this is stupid—but, of course, his whole experience on Solaris has been of the planet anthropomorphizing itself, and creating a face (Rheya) that really does despair, and perhaps has orgasms (though Lem is very circumspect about Kelvin and Rheya's sex life: see the "Steaminess Rating" section). So are we silly for seeing the other as the self? Or are we silly for harrumphing that the other is not the self?

Is Snow right about what Sartorius wants? He is saying that Sartorius is projecting humanity onto the ocean, but perhaps Snow is projecting his own feelings onto Sartorius? Other people are a mystery, especially when they are (or aren't) planet-size alien liquids.