Originally written for Embodying Fantastika Conference at Lancaster University
In her book, Literature in the Ashes of History, Cathy Caruth uses fictional narratives to explain ideas about history, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the act of witnessing, this aids the reader in understanding the complexities and contradictions essential to each topic and how they relate to the wider study of trauma theory. This method comes after, and seems partially an answer to, Caruth’s identification of an essential problem with trauma studies in her introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory; namely, ‘the problem of how to help relieve suffering, and how to understand the nature of the suffering, without eliminating the force and truth of the reality that trauma survivors face and quite often try to transmit to us.’ In fact, Caruth says that for many survivors: ‘To cure oneself – whether by drugs or the telling of one’s story or both – seems […] to imply the giving-up of an important reality, or the dilution of a special truth into the reassuring terms of therapy’. From this perspective, researchers studying trauma not only have to contend with the difficulties of articulation, but also the ethical question of whether these experiences even should be spoken about, and if so, by whom. Related concerns have also been put forward by Roger Luckhurst in The Trauma Question. He notes that researchers studying trauma have been known to become affected by a kind of ‘secondary experience’ after listening to the testimony of others. Through this, Luckhurst raises similar questions about the issue of articulation and asks, who has the right to communicate trauma, and to what extent can secondary experiences be validated in comparison to their primary counterparts? This question of justification and extent is up for further debate then can be adequately explored in this paper, nevertheless, as Luckhurst states: ‘transmissibility has become a central ethical concern about the representation and response to traumatic narratives and images. Can or should the right to speak of trauma be limited to its primary victims?’. I argue that the use of literature effectively sidesteps these issues, as the fictional space allows us to articulate areas of trauma theory without these ethical or personal risks. This approach certainly has clear limitations in its usefulness; while fictionality eliminates many ethical concerns, it does also diminish the amount of new data that can be collected and so case studies of real individuals remain as important as ever. Still, I believe literature offers a valuable space to articulate established theories on trauma, and even perhaps perform thought experiments, without being burdened by some of the moral concerns surrounding articulation and representation.
It is this same process of using literature as an illustrative tool which I hope to repeat in this paper, and in doing so better understand one of the most perplexing aspects of traumatic experience; the impossible to forget yet quickly corruptible nature of traumatic memory. I will be using Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 science fiction novel Solaris to explore this topic and show how its narrative can act as a useful allegory to illustrate theoretical ideas about trauma.
The narrative of Solaris details a group of scientists attempting, and failing, to communicate with an incomprehensible alien entity. The living ocean is a vast being of metamorphic plasma which covers Solaris, a planet which has two suns, zero landmass, and is lightyears away from earth. Despite, or perhaps because of, its remoteness, both figuratively and literally, the ocean profoundly disturbs and intrigues humanity and facilitates the creation of a new branch of science, Solaristics, which attempts to define and ultimately establish contact with the creature. The characters of the novel, Kelvin, Snow and Sartorius, are Solarists who have established a base on the planet surface and have been regularly blasting the ocean with radiation in an attempt at contact. This drastic measure does engender a response, but of a horrific sort. The ocean sends forth versions of people from the crew’s past who have no knowledge of their origins or their identities as replicas. Worse still, these ‘visitors’ (as they’re called) are inextricably linked to the crewmember who’s subconscious has formed them, and they possess incredible strength and indestructability to ensure that they can never be separated, though if they are abjected through drastic measures, a new copy will simply reappear and take their place. One such visitor is a copy of Kelvin’s wife, Rheya, who committed suicide twenty years earlier and now returns to Kelvin with no knowledge of her death but with the pink scar of a hypodermic needle still on her arm.
So, the living ocean and its avatars are beings at once close by and far away, they appear in forms we can understand but cannot quite reconcile with reality, they are intensely desired and fervently shunned. All these inherent contradictions make the visitors of Solaris ideal metaphors for trauma and the disorienting experience of traumatic memory.
On Solaris station, Kelvin awakens into a dream in which he encounters Rheya. Kelvin remarks how ‘evidently, the dead do not change; they remain eternally young’; at first glance, Rheya appears exactly as we would expect any ghostly presence to look, identical to herself at the time she died, eternally 20 years old. Still believing his vision to be a dream, Kelvin remarks how accurate his memory of her is even while asleep. It is then that he notices the small pink scar of a needle on Rheya’s arm, and begins to re-enact in his mind the event of her suicide. He laments that ‘[f]or years now [he] had dreamt of it, over and over again’, he acknowledges that in his sleep he ‘tried to relive what she had gone through’. He imagines her dread at the pain, and her terror as the injection took effect, he imagines her preparations and her final thoughts of his callousness which Kelvin believes led to this action. All of this is relayed to the reader from Kelvin’s perspective as an objective re-telling of events. This is a fitting allegorical demonstration of what Caruth calls ‘the surprising literality and non-symbolic nature of traumatic dreams and flashbacks.’ Kelvin’s recall of Rheya’s death isn’t reassuringly shrouded in metaphor, it appears, just like her double, as uncomfortably and unavoidably real, and just like the event itself, the remembrance occurs suddenly and without warning. This seemingly ‘perfect recall’ however, comes with a significant caveat for both Kelvin and trauma theorists. Dori Laub describes: the traumatic experience as one which has ‘long been submerged and has become distorted in its submersion’. This description would seem to contradict the ‘absolute truth’ Caruth mentions, but Laub goes on to note that: ‘[t]he horror is, indeed, compelling not only in its reality but even more so, in its flagrant distortion and subversion of reality’. From this we can infer that truth and distortion are equally parts of the traumatic memory, the distortion being all the more disturbing due to its otherwise grounding in reality. Rheya’s note is a useful allegory for this: the fact that ‘it was soiled and creased’ is akin the distortion of the memory as it is submerged, but Kelvin ‘never had the heart to throw it away’ suggests the ever-present possibility of recall out of the unconscious state of Kelvin’s wallet. Nevertheless, the words were still undeniably written by Rheya and embody her death, no amount of crumpled paper can undo that truth in Kelvin’s mind. It is also important to note that Kelvin is not attempting to relive his own experience here, but Rheya’s experience. This illustrates both secondary trauma, which Luckhurst notes now includes ‘receiving news of the death or injury of a relative’, and an overarching aspect of trauma in which the event is not absorbed by the subject as it occurs, only later during the re-enactment does the mind attempt to grasp the experience, as Caruth explains: ‘since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time’. Traumatic memory results from the mind’s attempt to re-live an experience it never fully ‘lived’ in the first place. It is only fitting, therefore, that Rheya’s ghost should haunt Kelvin in so alien a place as Solaris, the remoteness and incomprehensibility of the setting matches that of the remembrance.
As the encounter progresses, Rheya is revealed to be neither a dream nor a ghost: she is immensely strong and possesses an undeniable physicality, she is able to easily overpower Kelvin’s attempts to restrain her and in one terrifying scene she rips a door off its hinges, crumpling the wall around it as she does so. These actions aren’t malicious on Rheya’s part, as she is being compelled by the ocean to keep within sight of Kelvin at all times, and she has no memory of these events. At this point, Kelvin comes to the realisation that ‘it was the real Rheya there in the room’ although she seems ‘somehow stylised, reduced to certain characteristic expressions, gestures and movements’. We can read this realisation as an exploration of the causes of memory distortion in trauma. Rather than the subject simply misremembering certain details, the ‘true’ memory itself is outside the reach of the conscious mind to recollect it, as Caruth says: ‘while the images of traumatic re-enactment remain absolutely accurate and precise, they are largely inaccessible to conscious recall and control’. This is further echoed by Luckhurst when he says that: ‘Trauma somehow is seared directly into the psyche, almost like a piece of shrapnel, and is not subject to the distortions of subjective memory […] Yet […] what is most traumatic is that which does not appear in conscious memory […] Paradoxes intensify around this critical instant of a defining yet unknowable memory lodged in the mind’. Solaris acts as a metaphor for this bizarre occurrence, as at this point Kelvin is convinced that the figure before him is Rheya, yet her wrongness doesn’t come from anything additional like a glowing aura or rattling chains, but rather from a lack which strips her image down to its base components. This concept of pristine preservation mentioned by Luckhurst and Caruth is only one part of a two-model system first introduced by Freud, who theorised the possibility that we may not actually have any memories from our childhood, only memories relating to childhood. The possibility of the falsity and malleability of memory is the reason, alongside the impossibility of total recall, that the traumatic memory can only ever be considered incomplete. As Richard Terdiman states: ‘[t]he unconscious might seem to preserve pristine memories, but as soon as that ‘eerie fixity’ reached consciousness the traumatic memory ‘exhibits a positively wanton disloyalty to the truth’. We can see this confusing paradox play out in Solaris as mere pages after Kelvin’s assurance that the visitor is Rheya, he comes to the opposite conclusion that, ‘this was not Rheya’ a fact which is hideously brought to light by Rheya’s dress:
‘As she tried to take off her dress, an extraordinary fact became apparent: there were no zips, or fastenings of any sort; the red buttons down the front were merely decorative […] I picked up some kind of scalpel from the floor and slit the dress down the back from neck to waist, so that she could pull it over her head’.
The methodical way in which Lem depicts the selection of the scalpel and the slicing of the dress reinforces the sense of physicality more disturbingly even than Rheya’s feats of strength. Her innocent, embarrassed smile as Kelvin cuts her out of the dress also adds to the tension and reminds us that this revenant is in reality the expression of an apparently omniscient and unpredictable alien entity. The dress is also the image which best conveys the visitor’s origins in the crew’s memories, as the ocean is said to ‘psychically dissect’ the Solarists and gather their subconscious thoughts to create the visitors and so, since a zipper isn’t typically at the forefront of anyone’s mind, how would the ocean (a being to which the concept of clothes is bizarre enough) know to include one? This, along with any other deficiencies in Rheya, is the direct result and embodiment of the incompleteness of Kelvin’s memory. This one scene conveys to the reader both Rheya’s inherent ‘otherness’ and the futility of an anthropomorphic view of a universe which contains such a creature as the living ocean. But this scene becomes even more interesting and illuminative of Lem’s text when it is compared to its sibling a few chapters later. In fear and despair Kelvin traps Rheya in a shuttle and launches her into space as the capsule violently shakes and an inhuman voice cries out. It is then that a relieved Kelvin says that he ‘had found the real Rheya again – the Rheya of [his] memories’. This statement is as ironic as it is short lived, as the visitors always return. After succumbing to despair, or perhaps desire, Kelvin is visited again by a new Rheya and greets her lovingly.
While at first, Rheya’s ghostly presence is defined by her relationship to Kelvin, as the narrative progresses her character develops from spectral simulacrum into a unique individual possessing greater agency. This is first indicated in the new Rheya’s version of the dress scene:
‘Two dresses, draped over the back of a chair, caught my eye – two absolutely identical white dresses, each decorated with a row of red buttons. I myself had helped Rheya out of one of them, and she had reappeared, yesterday evening, dressed in the second. She followed my glance. ‘I had to cut the seam open with scissors,’ she said’.
It is apparent in this scene that the new Rheya is identical to the last in a way which fittingly embodies the traumatic recurrence of memory; more so because for all her continuity with the first Rheya, she is also different. Where the first Rheya stood blankly and without comment while Kelvin removed her dress, the new Rheya exhibits far more agency, firstly in the fact that she cuts her own dress this time, but secondly in her obviously increased awareness of her environment and of Kelvin.
Contrasted against Kelvin’s desperate desire to remain within the simulation the ocean first offered him, Rheya’s growing knowledge about exactly who, and what, she is sees her express her agency and reject the roles imposed upon her by both the ocean and Kelvin. Rheya is then shown to be more than just an embodiment of trauma when she, herself, is proved to be traumatised. The scene in which she intentionally drinks liquid oxygen is essentially a re-enactment of the original Rheya’s suicide, a horrific event which this Rheya did not actually experience, and yet and at some unconscious level is haunted by to the point that she tries to recapture the moment, only to be revived by the indestructability which the ocean has imbued her with. Living the experience fully this time and being able to come to terms with it allows both Rheya and Kelvin to move on, and subsequently they acknowledge to each other and to themselves that she is not Rheya, but something new. She says to Kelvin, ‘you won’t forget that I am the one who is here, not her’ referring to the original Rheya, the one in Kelvin’s dreams, who died twenty years ago. Only in the literature of fantastika could such a scene play out, and it embodies the way in which trauma is often caused less by the threat of death, but by a disruption of the subject’s experience of time, as Caruth says: ‘What causes trauma […] is an encounter that is not directly perceived as a threat to the life of the organism but that occurs, rather, as a break in the mind’s experience of time’. From the very beginning Rheya (in both incarnations) has been confused at how, and why, and when she boarded Solaris station. It is not until she is able to fully “own” the trauma which lingers over her that she is able to assert her own identity into the foreground.
Rheya’s character arc, when read by critic Ann Weinstone, reveals in Solaris a feminist concern for personal autonomy: ‘Rheya’s interior space is entirely taken up by her relationship to Kelvin. What she has been fashioned to forget is her “self”. After reliving the original Rheya’s experience and reconciling her true nature with Kelvin, Rheya decides to finally rid herself of all external influences and convinces Snow to disassemble her physical form. Of this scene, Weinstone says that: ‘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’. This reading synergises well with the assertions of wider critical discourse surrounding Solaris, which often regards it as a metatextual critique on Science fiction’s tendencies in this era toward racially insensitive and sexist themes, and overly anthropomorphic depictions of the universe. It is this wider cultural concern which haunts Solaris, akin the way Roger Luckhurst describes: Repetition compulsion [as a] ‘cultural shorthand for the consequences of traumatic events: individuals, collectives and nations risk trapping themselves in cycles of uncomprehending repetition’. Viewing trauma from this wider perspective, I argue that patriarchy constitutes a kind of wide-reaching cultural trauma, one which Lem is attempting to reconcile within his writing.
I wanted to finish upon this thought as I hope it shows, to some degree, how helpful literary texts can be as both tools for articulating established ideas on trauma, and catalysts for inspiring new ways of thinking about the topic. Even as a reiterative tool, I believe fantastika especially has a valuable role to play in the development of trauma theory, as it is the mode of literature best suited to conveying paradoxes, the feeling of the incomprehensible, the wonder of the future, and the fear of the past.