Unspeakable Otherness—an Essay on the Failure of Cognitive and Epistemic Communication Tools in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris

Stanislaw Lem is one of the most famous figures of the Polish science fiction in post-world war two Europe. Solaris. His most famous novel, was published in 1961, and was adapted twice for the big screen, first in 1971 by Andrej Tarkovski, and in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. The plot revolves around the psychologist Kris Kelvin, who is sent on the planet Solaris to try to find out if it is possible to communicate with the alien ocean that covers almost all of its surface. Confronted with a strange phenomenon and colleagues turned paranoid, Kelvin tries at first to understand what is going on at the space station. The unexplained arrival of the döppleganger of his ex-partner, Harey, will little by little make him accept the absurdity of his task and possibly of life itself. As Lem himself refused any final interpretation of his novel, there has of course been a flourish of them. One can however choose this exegetic impossibility as a major theme in the novel, and reflect on the implications of the situation Kelvin faces, caught between a desire to understand the nature of Solaris’s ocean and the sheer failure of doing so. In this essay, we will try to suggest that, by showing the limits of language as the means to express a satisfying epistemic frame, Lem’s parabol could be seen as an attempt to show the reader the existential limits of our anthropocentrism and scientific hubris.