Fluid Worlds

Stanislaw Lem and Vladimir Nabokov, having shown a lifelong interest in science as well as art, both recognize the importance of imagination for knowledge: according to Lem, tomorrow’s science can seem like fantasy today, and Nabokov acknowledges that the perception of all reality requires creative imagination. The role of imagination in all perception means that the boundaries between the observer and the observed are not fixed because the observer’s imagination connects him or her to the natural world. The boundaries between observer and nature thus become fluid, and fluidity becomes an important metaphor for the nature of all perception. The risk of such fluid imaginative strength is insanity because as reality seems most fluid, the characters’ imaginations can transform all reality into a self-reflecting mirror. Thus the more they are connected to the fluid world, the more they become isolated from that world and each other. Lem’s and Nabokov’s major works, Solaris and Ada, both deal with fluid worlds—the sentient ocean of the planet Solaris, and the water-dominated world of the planet Antiterra. Solaris’s ocean can penetrate the inmost thoughts of its observers and precipitate them out in strange formations or exact replicas of its observers’ memories, and water serves as the chief source of power and communications on Antiterra. However, there is danger in these fluid worlds. The more intensively they study Solaris, the more the Solarists become mesmerized by the ocean’s replicants of their own imaginations and see mere reflections of their own minds. They cannot escape anthropomorphizing the fluid planet, preventing contact with it, and making communication with each other more difficult. In a similar way, those characters with the most vivid imaginations on Antiterra find themselves remaking reality in their own images. Lem and Nabokov join with scientists in recognizing the importance of some agreed-upon reality principle to make possible a sane world of communication. Lem emphasizes that a knowledge of scientific facts is vital to his fiction, and Nabokov claims that imagination without knowledge can only produce primitive art. In Solans and Ada, we see worlds consistent on their own terms, worlds where certain hypotheses more nearly coincide with reality—however qualified that concept might be. Nevertheless, the rational characters in both novels seem sane at the cost of a crippling inability to interpret what they see and to intuit the nature of foreign worlds. Only when the characters can achieve a tension-filled balance between certain shared principles of reality and the imaginative capacity to infer the existence of other worlds can they begin to understand nature or discover love. Lem and Nabokov thus join in their conviction that science, art, and love all depend upon a balance between imagination and a sense of reality. (DF)

Art · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies