Green Planets (44 page)

Both the failure of symptomatic readings and the possibility of other kinds of depth reading hinge on Rheya. Ann Weinstone's insight that Rheya “occupies a gap” can extend further.
⁹
Rheya occupies not only the gap between Kelvin's memories and Solaris's materiality, but also a gap in scale between macro and micro, life and death, object and subject, environment and organism. One scene that specifically addresses Rheya's ontological suspense occurs in
chapter 7
, where Kelvin decides to give Rheya a medical examination and takes a sample of her blood to analyze under a powerful neutron microscope. It is a moment when Rheya becomes, for him, a landscape. Part of what compels me to look at the microscope scene is the way that Rheya's body is rendered as a surface (literally placed on a slide) for the benefit of a male observer. Bending over a microscope, Kelvin says: “I could hear Rheya's voice, but without taking in what she was saying. Beneath my gaze, sharply foreshortened, was a vast desert flooded with silvery light, and strewn with rounded boulders—red corpuscles—which trembled and wriggled behind a veil of mist. I focused the eye-piece and penetrated further into the depths of the silvery landscape.”
¹⁰
The fact that Kelvin cannot “hear” Rheya or take in what she is saying privileges the visual and objective over the aural and subjective; he also ignores her as a legitimate subject worthy of response. His comment also draws on the long history of equating women's bodies with landscapes, of forcefully penetrating into the secrets of a feminized “nature”—a silvery, ethereal one at that. Yet like Solaris itself, Rheya's blood resists Kelvin's total comprehension. Looking further, Kelvin notices an anomaly: a deformed erythrocyte, “sunken in the centre, whose uneven edges projected sharp shadows over the depths of a circular crater. The crater, bristling with silver ion deposits, extended beyond the microscope's field of vision.” Curious, Kelvin enlarges the resolution, expecting that “at any moment, I should reach the limit of this exploration of the depths; the shadow of a molecule occupied the whole of the space; then the image became fuzzy. There was nothing to be seen. There should have been the ferment of a quivering cloud of atoms, but I saw nothing.”
¹¹
In attempting to gaze into Rheya's physical structure, to know what makes phi-creatures different, Kelvin gets simply nothing.

Incredulous as to what he is
not
seeing, Kelvin performs another test to examine the materiality of Rheya's blood. He drops congealed acid onto the “coral tinted pearl” of blood; it turns gray, “a dirty foam rose to the surface,”
¹²
and then the blood surprisingly re-creates itself. Kelvin's attempt to disintegrate the blood sample only results in a stubborn reintegration, a reterritorialization of its structure. Kelvin then answers the call to be part of a three-way teleconference with the other two male scientists on board—forming a kind of triangular
solidarity between them, exclusive of Rheya. During this conversation, Kelvin proposes that the blood is in fact “a camouflage. A cover, in a way, it's a super-copy, a reproduction which is superior to the original. I'll explain what I mean: there exists, in man, an absolute limit—a term to structural divisibility—whereas here, the frontiers have been pushed back. We are dealing with a sub-atomic structure.”
¹³
The subatomic structure Kelvin infers—from not being able to see a structure beyond the erythrocyte—is the neutrino. Importantly, Rheya's ontological difference does not appear through visual signs, but only the absence of known signs. Rheya—and by metonymic association, Solaris—continues to resist scientific depth reading, her concreteness only inferred. That Kelvin only sees human blood cells suggests that he can only relate her difference in terms of what he knows. In a telling line earlier in the novel, one of the other scientists, Dr. Snow, tells Kelvin, “We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.”
¹⁴
This line resonates with a central crisis of the novel: that human beings can only know what is other through existing frameworks of cognition and linguistic means.

While this interpretation would be sympathetic to Jameson's thesis that Lem's ocean is ultimately unknowable, suggesting a kind of asymptotic limit to what the human can understand, such a reading misses the entire affect of the scene. The scene is particularly difficult to bear reading if one's sympathies lie with Rheya rather than the scientists—to endure a kind of isolating scrutiny and scopic vivisection by scientists whose aim is to tell you what you are, what you are made of. If one sympathizes with Rheya, it becomes clear that the version of depth reading performed here fails not because Rheya is entirely unknowable, but because the entirely wrong questions are being asked of her without regard to the relational nature of knowledge. Earlier in the novel, we learn that Rheya's phantom-like existence depends upon Kelvin and his memories; she finds it physically painful to leave his presence, and violently breaks down barriers between them if restrained by objects like doors. Kelvin even considers if she might be a projection from his mind, for it is clear that her existence depends on physical proximity to him. However, Kelvin entirely neglects his own role in Rheya's existence when he looks through the microscope into the silvery landscape of her blood cells, with the intention of investigating what she is made of—not what she is in relation to himself. The critical problem that
Solaris
dramatizes is the cul-de-sac of scientific investigation that brackets the observer out of the dynamic relation between phenomena/other and self.

At this point, I want to distinguish between symptomatic and depth reading,
and suggest that
Solaris
introduces the possibility of other kinds of “deep” reading, where depth ceases to be synonymous with penetration, mastery, and vision, but instead shifts into a register of experience based on curiosity, tactility, and the production of meaning in a particular moment. Depth understood this way—as bi-directional, heading to the waters and the sky—unfolds in the last scene of the novel where Kelvin interacts with an ocean wave. Although throughout the text Kris Kelvin never visits the surface of Solaris—which should be surprising, considering that he is an expert in Solaris studies—he finally decides to make a trip down to the surface after Rheya dies.
¹⁵
After descending to the surface and exploring a Mimoid (a large surface structure with a finite life span), Kelvin realizes that “I had flown here not to explore the formation but to acquaint myself with the ocean.”
¹⁶
Kelvin continues on to describe his encounter with a wave at the edge of the Mimoid:

When the next wave came I held out my hand. What followed was a faithful reproduction of a phenomenon which had been analyzed a century before: the wave hesitated, recoiled, then enveloped my hand without touching it, so that a thin covering of “air” separated my glove inside a cavity which had been fluid a moment previously, and now had a fleshy consistency. I raised my hand slowly, and the wave, or rather an outcrop of the wave, rose at the same time, enfolding my hand in a translucent cyst with greenish reflections. I stood up, so as to raise my hand still higher, and the gelatinous substance stretched like a rope, but did not break…. A flower had grown out of the ocean, and its calyx was molded to my fingers.
¹⁷

Kelvin's approach to Solaris studies shifts dramatically from positioning himself as a distant observer to becoming a participant in mutual exploration and experimentation. Although Kelvin calls it a “faithful reproduction of a phenomenon” observed before, his description suggests that the wave acts in the moment, according to its curiosity: “the wave hesitated, recoiled, then enveloped my hand.” Kelvin's observations show the wave as active and agential through these verbs, rather that as passive, as object; it exhibits “cautious but feral alertness, a curiosity avid for quick apprehension of a new, unexpected form.”
¹⁸
That the wave envelops Kelvin's hand, rather than the other way around, suggests that the wave is partially in control of the situation and literally grasps/apprehends Kelvin by itself.

Kelvin notes that none of the accounts of Solaris he had read “prepared me for
the experience as I had lived it, and I felt somehow changed.” We see a distinct shift in his descriptions of Solaris that relate to the singularity and affect of lived experience. This leads into a brief moment of identification: “The contrast was inexpressible between that lively curiosity [of the wave] and the shimmering immensity of the ocean…. I sat unseeing, glided down an irresistible slope and identified myself with the dumb, fluid colossus.”
¹⁹
Kelvin no longer brackets himself out of the experimental situation; his experience with the wave leads him to momentarily identify with the larger Solaris ocean—an ocean silent (dumb) but expressively tactile. Although we might doubt Kelvin's success in doing this, the moment is significant as the only time in the entire novel that Kelvin feels compelled to identify with any form of an other, or imagine that other's point of view.

Thus at the “surface” of the planet, we see the possibility of knowledge production that takes place at the interface between beings that share mutual curiosity. Yet the interface is by no means flat; it too can take on a sense of depth, of dimensional relation. Departing from a model of depth reading that we saw throughout most of the novel, which involved the interpretive efforts of a distant observer seeking to uncover secrets of a reticent subject (Rheya, Solaris), the narrative ends with the possibility of a new practice of gathering knowledge that shifts from an aerial/visual sense to a liquid/tactile one. Whereas the aerial/visual method of investigation allowed Kelvin to bracket himself out of the observed phenomena, such as with his studies of Rheya's blood, the liquid/tactile method of investigation at the end of the novel implicates Kelvin in the coproduction of knowledge. The wave encircling his hand responds directly to his movements, such that what Kelvin observes is entirely contingent on his own participation—and ecology of knowledge production. Kelvin's question shifts away from “What is it?” or “What are you?” to, rather, “What are you in relation to me when I am here?” The Solaris ocean opens the possibility of depth reading as the unfolding of a dimensional relation between two or more entities who mutually respond to each other.

“OCEANIC”

If “depth reading” in
Solaris
ends on the possibility of the unfolding of a dimensional relation, “Oceanic” offers yet another alternative for understanding “depth” in relation to both a terrestrial and oceanic point of view. Just as
Solaris
trained us to look for the way “depth reading” could change from a one-way to
a relational process, “Oceanic” suggests that we investigate how the figurative meanings of depth—religious, gendered—also find their meaning in relation between ocean and land. Egan's novella takes place on a planet called Covenant, set at an unspecified date in the future after human beings achieve both space travel and the ability to live forever without material bodies. The mythic “crossing” had taken place long enough ago that the people of Covenant no longer know why the “Angels” chose to incarnate into material bodies again, nor why there was a significant decrease in technology soon after they terraformed Covenant. The title “Oceanic” transparently alludes to the “oceanic feeling” coined by Romain Rolland and popularized by Sigmund Freud in
Civilization and Its Discontents
. Freud begins with a friend's description of the feeling of transcendent limitlessness, which he does not feel himself, and goes on to relate it to the ego's original unity with nature and the maternal body.
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Egan both literalizes and fictionalizes Freud's oceanic feeling, imagining a religion in which a drowned and resurrected Beatrice figures as Jesus, and in which religious feeling is experienced most intensely during and after a brief baptism in the depths of the ocean. “Oceanic” dramatizes the religious crisis that occurs when the ocean depths cease to signify a holy, mysterious connection to Beatrice and instead become knowable through the pharmacological effects of indigenous microbes. This ultimately suggests an ecology of metaphoric meaning in which depth ceases to be legible as a stable concept, but evolves in relation to multiple factors that include science, gender, religion, myth, the ocean, and its microbes.

The story begins with the protagonist Martin slowly falling asleep on a boat to the rhythm of the waves. Martin's brother Daniel suddenly asks him if he believes in God, admitting that he has joined the Deep Church and taken literally the following piece of scripture: “‘Unless you are willing to drown in My blood, you will never look upon the face of My Mother.' So they bound each other hand and foot, and weighted themselves down with rocks.” The way to acquire true faith, Daniel insists, is through immersion deep in the ocean, for “In the water, you're alone with God.”
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In Daniel's view, a literal baptism enables real, spiritual faith. Martin's induction into the church through consensual drowning repeats the language of Freud's oceanic feeling: “Suddenly, everything was seared with light … as if I was an infant again and my mother had wrapped her arms around me tightly. It was like basking in sunlight, listening to laughter, dreaming of music too beautiful to be real.”
²²
This moment of oceanic feeling merges the spiritual and the physical, taking the ocean as the site or wellspring of religious feeling and faith. The Mother (God) and the mother ocean are taken
as one, where Martin is able to both feel the immenseness of the universe and, ecstatically, experience himself as inseparable from it.

The main conflict of the story revolves around Martin's disenchantment with the Deep Church once he begins studying science. His work on Covenant's pre-Angelic fauna, or life before the arrival of human colonists, threatens to demystify the “true” cause of the oceanic feeling by pinning it on microbes rather than a relationship with holy Beatrice. Martin finds that “rather than rain bringing new life from above, an ocean-dwelling species from a much greater depth had moved steadily closer to the surface, as the Angels' creations drained oxygen from the water.” In other words, the process of what the story calls “ecopoiesis”—or the terraforming that made Covenant hospitable to human colonists—creates conditions that end up being favorable to a specific kind of benthic microbe: