Apprehensive Patriarchies: Depictions of Masculinity and the Feminized Jouissance of the Other in the Fiction of Jules Verne and Stanisław Lem Melika Hadziomerovic

Thesis Director: Terry Harpold Reader: Maureen Turim

Abstract. This project analyzes the work of Jules Verne and Stanisław Lem to understand the ways in which patriarchy struggles to apprehend the feminine Other in nineteenth and twentieth century adventure and science fiction. Given Lem's interest in Verne and the canon of European and Anglo-American literature, this project makes its aim the sober examination of the ways in which patriarchal apprehensions and myths of the monstrous-feminine are maintained or undermined in Lem and Verne‘s fiction.

By arguing that these apprehensions and myths are presented by way of phallogocentric elements of the authors‘ literary influences and societies, I affirm that they struggle to escape linguistic problems of sexual difference in representations of a search for the Thing of the Real

(in Lacan‘s terminology), by way of characters who explore radically Other, physical,

Unheimlich terrains. The thesis explores the ways in which the exploration of (literary) space through the use of apparatuses of scientific modernity belies a desire to answer to the typical obsessional/neurotic question, what is man? I explain that this query encodes a more select problem of gender identity (what is man?). The authors‘ depictions of masculinist/expansionist failures are treated as a contribution to the complex, contradictory meaning of identity and gender in their fictions.

Jules Verne, a classic author of early adventure fiction, is most widely – if inaccurately – recognized as a founding figure of science fiction due to his discussions of industrialization and technology in works such as Les Indes noires [The Underground City] (1877) and Vingt Mille

Lieux sous les mers [Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas] (1869). Among the effects of this problematic categorization, Verne has gained a wide readership in the 20th century of prospective sf authors and critics, many of whom cite him as a major influence and source of inspiration. This project focuses on both Verne‘s fiction and the fiction of Stanisław Lem – a renowned 20th century sf author. My primary focus will be similarities between these authors‘ narrative themes and character archetypes.

Internationally renowned for his fiction and critical work, Polish author Stanisław Lem refers to Verne as one of the breakthrough authors of early modernity (―Reflections‖ 17). Given

Lem‘s interest in Verne and the canon of European and Anglo-American sf, a study of literary- cross cultivation may be productive. Such a study should, I propose, address Lem‘s adoption of

Verne‘s narrative tropes, as not only reiterations/rewritings of Verne‘s fiction, but also rewritings of a classical literary canon from which both authors gain inspiration.

However, a careful study of this nature cannot be undertaken without a sober examination of a subset of the problem of shared influence: the ways in which the patriarchal apprehensions of this canon have influenced Verne and Lem‘s fictions. Both authors‘ protagonists are almost always male subjects of masculinist societies who demonstrate their masculinity through the drive to conquer the mysteries of uncanny (Unheimlich) spaces (both terrestrial and cosmic).1

Are these authors‘ depictions of the masculine libido productive, or are they the problematic for their reinforcement of patriarchal biases? What insights do these authors offer regarding the construction of gender, even as they write in genres (adventure fiction and sf) which have been

1 As defined in Sigmund Freud‘s essay on the uncanny.

used to promote masculinist and expansionist agendas? To what extent are the customs and apprehensions of waning patriarchies inscribed in these authors‘ fictions, especially as these patriarchies transition from premodern to modern modes of being? This project concerns itself with these issues and will investigate the ways in which patriarchal culture becomes rewritten, and perhaps undermined, in the literary ages of each respective author.

The ages in question are Verne‘s 19th century France and Lem‘s 20th century Poland.

My emphasis is the role of gender in both of these societies, in particular the ways in which they form variations on ―proper‖ models of masculinity and femininity through their fixations with modern science and technology. In light of this phenomena, the thesis will aim to elaborate on the ways in which Lem and Verne depict a new model of masculinity (based on scientific/rational mastery) as a way to answer the (obsessional neurotic) question, what is existence? By using Lacanian theories of sexual difference and gender construction, we can understand Lemian and Vernian characters as obsessional neurotics who attempt to ignore the alienation and lack felt in the symbolic realm (of language), by converting issues of sexual anxiety into intellectual pursuits. The characters‘ resulting drive to name and apprehend the mysteries of unknown and untouched physical space (to find the Thing, das Ding), will be read as a desire to define the elements of the Real (unknown and unreached physical spaces) through signification. I will show that these obsessional structures are engaged by both authors in a way which reveals a durable sexist bias.

A second aim of the thesis will then be to show that questions of obsessional neurosis in

Verne and Lem‘s fictions transform into hysterical questions of gender identity because Verne and Lem are trapped in the phallocentric language of their societies. Though Lem and Verne attempt to depict a meeting with the Thing of the Real in the novels I will discuss, they

inevitably describe this meeting as an encounter with the monstrous-feminine. Thus these characters – who madly march into the unknown regions of the world to answer ―the‖ question

(what is man/humanity), ultimately end up asking, what is woman?

Patriarchy: Language and Abjection

Before addressing the representations of femininity in relation to patriarchal myth in these authors‘ fictions, it is important to define the basic characteristics, ambitions, and apprehensions of patriarchy as a general social order. The principle – the ubiquitous – characteristic of this order is that it is founded and sustained through the construction of irreducible sexual difference. In other words, gender archetypes (masculinity and femininity) function to separate roles of the male subject from those of the female subject. In contemporary

American popular culture, these archetypes are the bread and butter of typical housewife/comedy sitcoms such as I Love Lucy. Here the male subject, Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz) emerges as our model of sensibility and authority in comparison to Lucy (Lucille Ball), whose frantic and crazy antics are comical in their deviation from the proper and acceptable modes of behavior prescribed by him. As such, Ricky‘s paternal law in I Love Lucy is, for the most part, the only unquestionable and sensible alternative to Lucy‘s feminine neuroses. Sexual difference is then not only a question of biological identity, but also of an individual‘s proper social place, and the manner in which this is narrated and possibly contested.

But to understand how deviations from this social proper are handled within the economy of sexual difference, it is helpful to consult Julia Kristeva‘s work on the abject. Kristeva defines the abject as anything which ―disturbs identity, system and order,‖ (Kristeva cited in Creed 36).

Abject objects are exactly those things which figure a crossing or a threat to cross the border of

what constitutes proper society and (in so doing) threaten to undermine the clarity or purity of its order (40). Exemplary objects have been historically identified with the products of bodily functions which may or may not be described in religious economy (excrement and bodily decay), objects which trouble religious economy (blasphemous eating habits and sexual acts), crimes (which threaten the stability of the law), and the feminine subject, insofar as this subject threatens to overtake the power of the patriarch (Creed 38–39). Rigidly defined systems (here expressed as social, religious, legal and patriarchal) define the abject through rituals of defilement (Creed 42).

Once the province of religion, Kristeva argues that the purification of the abject in modern societies is predominantly the responsibility of art in its variegated forms (Kristeva cited in Creed 46). While Barbara Creed uses Kristeva‘s work to extend the role of purification of the monstrous-feminine to the modern horror film, it is possible to similarly extend this role to Verne and Lem‘s fiction, as both authors discuss experiences of horror, anxiety, and repulsion in the face of a radical, inexplicable Other. For Kristeva, any art which descends ―into the foundations of the symbolic construct,‖ does so in the attempt to struggle with the abject (46). I would argue that literature influenced by patriarchy defines the abject through rituals of literalization, as its use of the (denotative, precise, notionally unambiguous) written word places a special emphasis on the realm of the symbolic as a male dominated region. In keeping with this, Lem and Verne‘s

(masculinist) characters struggle to conquer the abject through a process of naming and intellectual apprehension. Their depictions and treatment of the abject become problematic, however, when we take into account the how literal and traditional rituals of defilement link the abject with the maternal body.

The Split in Being: Lacan’s Abject Mother

Kristeva argues that an individual‘s mother is his/her first experience with the abject.

This association can be explained through a study of childhood development as defined by

Lacan‘s tripartite scheme of the Real, imaginary, and symbolic realms. In Lacanian theory, the child first experiences an imaginary unity with the mother in which communication is facilitated through a relationship of identification and mutuality. In this pre-linguistic relationship meaning is (by imagination) translated directly. This maternal communication is defined by Kristeva as the maternal ―semiotic‖ which ―posits a preverbal dimension of language that relates to sounds and tone and to the direct expression of the drives and physical contact with the maternal figure.‖

(Creed 44).

However, as the infant works to overcome the discoordination and fragmentation of its body, he or she must separate (individuate) from this unity with the mother and identify with, according to Lacan, a specular image in the form of another adult or child perceived as a ―unified whole‖ (Gestalt) (Evans 74). Lacan calls this moment of alienation-in-identification the ―mirror stage.‖ For Lacan, the primordial unity with the mother is effected by the introduction of the symbolic father, who acts as a third term intervening in the dual relationship with the mother, which forces the child to form a social existence (Evans 61). Because of this, the father is seen as a savior who prevents the child from remaining in the illusory order of the imaginary, and the consequent psychoses that result from being unable to disassociate with the mother.

By identifying with its specular image – which, perversely, is only an image, not a concrete and equivalent duplicate/double – the child transitions into a social order of difference

(known as the symbolic order) which is regulated by the law of the father (Kristeva, cited in

Creed 36). Lacan‘s theory of the symbolic is based on the ―idea that the social world is structured

by certain laws which regulate kinship relations and the exchange of gifts,‖ for which the most fundamental exchange of gifts is the exchange of language (Evans 201). Kristeva and Creed take issue with the phallic bias of this model of individuation and socialization (Evans 142). Though

Lacan is clear in making the distinction that masculinity and femininity are psychosexual positions (which not dependent on the real presence of the biological organ of the penis) it should be maintained that this distinction between anatomical structure and signifying structure is lost in patriarchal society. The internalized ideal of the phallus, and the perception of real, permanent sexual difference based on the presence or absence of the phallus/penis, is upheld in

Western patriarchies as the proper organizing force of society. Moreover, the linguistic construction of this realm still has a phallic bias. Though language is, arguably, not a priori masculine or feminine, the law which regulates linguistic structure is masculine. As a result, paternal law defines its alternative (maternal semiotic/authority) as equivalent to, or leading to abjection. The child, caught between these two extremes, experiences the conflicting desire to both separate from the mother in order to form its own identity as well as a desire to return to the comforting unity with the mother of the imaginary realm. By defiling the maternal as a place of prohibited identification equivalent to incest, the patriarch ensures the child‘s separation from maternal authority even in adulthood.

One way in which the feminine is defiled in this system – that is, made equivalent to the abject – is through the association of the female body with other polluting objects. These abjections can be further classified into two broad categories: the ―excremental, which threatens identity from the outside, and menstrual, which threatens from within,‖ (Kristeva, cited in Creed

41–42). Thus the female body, female jouissance, and menstrual blood (which is uniquely a product of the female body) are become homologous to abjections such as corporeal alteration,

decay, and death (Creed 37). This maternal/female subject is first associated with excremental abjection through her traditional role in a child‘s sphincter/toilet training (Creed 42–43). Kristeva argues that this training can also be described (positively) as an expression of the maternal semiotic in which the mother maps the child‘s body by showing it its clean and unclean areas.

Her authority physically forms the child‘s conception of his or her body by intimate touch. Most importantly, this authority is exercised without feelings of guilt or shame, because the child has not yet signified itself as a whole and proper subject of the symbolic. In patriarchy, however, excremental objects ultimately stand for the death of the ego by abjections from the outside. This is why, I will argue, Verne and Lem‘s masculinist characters must travel beyond the limits of habitable space/patriarchal life (the North Pole, deep space) before they can experience a sense of great horror.

Secondly, patriarchy interprets the maternal body as a menacing, consuming force. This is because the child, according to Lacan, is always at risk of falling back into identity with the mother. This voracious mother menaces the emergent child with ego death if this does occur, which is really just another way of saying that she displaces the authority of the paternal law.

This fear of ego death is often represented as a fear of bodily death in fiction: in Lem and

Verne‘s fiction, the fear of the consuming mother is represented as the fear of falling into an abyss. Creed alerts us to the fact that the representation of the mother as a gaping hole is present is almost every civilization. She calls this abject figure ―the archaic mother.‖ The origins of this

(patriarchally-determined) figure of abjection can be found in myths of the Greek Goddess- mothers and the myth of the mother as a parthenogenetic (that is, self-sufficient, un-sexually- differentiated) being who ―gives birth to all living things‖ (Creed 51).

Unlike the Pre-Oedipal and Oedipal mother, this archaic mother poses the greatest threat to patriarchy because she is a figure completely outside of the ―patriarchal family constellation.‖

Symbolized by her ―gestating, all-devouring womb,‖ she cannot ever be reconstructed as a lack

(Creed 52). What is so horrifying about this variant of the womb (in contrast to the actual female reproductive organs) is that it cannot be talked about as having the phallus or being castrated - this womb is always understood beyond the logic of the symbolic realm (Creed 52). As a result, patriarchal myths create a version of the abject mother in which she is a gaping hole, or a black abyss in which all signification will be consumed. Most often she is the ―voracious maw,‖ the toothed-vagina (vagina dentata), or ―the mysterious black hole.‖ To use a term which appears over again in Verne‘s and Lem‘s fiction, she is an abyss. This imagery, in part, is meant to express the form of the terrifying vagina/wound of castration. However, this opening also signifies the route leading to the negating womb (Creed 56). This is marked in Verne and Lem‘s fictions by the description of abyssal spaces as, seemingly paradoxically, lush nexuses of fertility

(plant and biological life). The real threat of the archaic mother is then not castration, but rather a fear of the ―fullness‖ or ―emptiness‖ of the womb which consumes phallic language, and thereby cancels out its power to demarcate differences (Creed 55).

The Lacanian Jouissance of the Body and the Thing:

The profound lack and alienation which subjects of the symbolic realm feel is described by Verne as an alienation that begins with the separation from the mother. However, this lack is also based on the inability of linguistic signifiers to describe the signified. In Lacan‘s theories, words always reduce (and do a partial disservice to) the reality that they are trying to reproduce.

Patriarchal subjects, unaware of how their desire is constituted by lack, insist upon the

insignificance of this alienation and lack – which is in fact an effect of the loss of the maternal semiotic/authority. Patriarchy suppresses the value of this semiotic by insisting that a signifier that will describe the Real directly is not only preferred but mandated. The subject in Lacan who is ―always looking forward to self-mastery,‖ is always terrified of being enveloped in the chaos present before his birth (Lacan qtd. in Creed 57).

But then how do we explain the ways in which the drive towards the abyss is both a hallmark of desire and a suicidal tendency in Lacan‘s model? Verne and Lem‘s depictions of the experience of the abyss figure this dynamic of desire/disgust or negativity/wishful positivity. In their fictions, the drive towards this abject void pushes through to the Lacanian/real Thing which is beyond the jouissance of the phallic economy. This Other jouissance of the body, which is described as the lack in the symbolic realm, remains, from the perspective of the phallic economy an impossible, unknowable Other.

The subject‘s drive towards this Other of the body is regulated by the reality principle

(Evans 161). The aim of the reality principle is the provisional satisfaction of the drives. Like the pleasure principle, this principle keeps the subject‘s desire alive by actually holding off a more complete satisfaction, by keeping the subject at a safe distance away from the Thing which it conjectures would give satisfaction. As Lacan reminds us, this jouissance is ―always a path towards death‖ as it is a desire to break through the pleasure principle towards self-immolation to merge with eternity (Lacan qtd. in Evans 92). To join with the universe the ego must undergo a psychic death in which the mastered self of the symbolic is destroyed. The immolation of the ego however, is not a final death but an extension of existence into the infinite. The reality principle then functions to keep the subject away from this Thing, as the subject who might attain it would only be able to interpret it – before it is achieved – as suffering or evil (Evans 161; 205).

This Thing, this push towards an infinity that is constituted in the Real, resembles the desire for unity with the mother in the imaginary realm. My claim is that the Thing in the context of jouissance is then a useful model for which to explain Lem and Verne‘s tendencies to describe the archaic mother as this Thing which triggers desire. In the context of jouissance, the Thing is sometimes imagined as the lost, primordial mother which the child continually desires to find again (Evans 205). Though union with the archaic mother may represent ego death, this death allows the individual to free itself from the sexual difference (and by proxy alienation) it feels in the symbolic realm dominated by the signifying power of the patriarch. As Georges Bataille highlights, the drive towards the infinite reflects a desire to escape the discontinuity signified by life for the ―continuity and nondifferentiation‖ signified by death (Bataille, qtd. in Creed 27).

While we may applaud Verne and Lem for desiring to return to a maternal/non-differentiated reality in which gender lays no claim to power, it is still important to assess whether their characters succumb to the depiction of the womb as this Thing and whether this depiction functions to ritually defile feminine objects/subjects.

Patriarchal Context: Jules Verne

In this section of my essay I will move from a description of a general discourse on the abjected mother and patriarchy, to focus on Verne‘s particular biographical and writerly engagement with his patriarchal society. His decision to focus his work on characters obsessed with scientific practice and discourse is due, I propose, to his passion for innovations of modern science in 19th century France. His characters‘ search for this scientific discovery can be viewed as the expression of a desire for the Lacanian Thing (das Ding) in the context of jouissance. In

other words, Verne‘s characters are in search of the ―prehistorical unforgettable Other‖ who must be continually ―refound‖ but who is inevitably seen as a primordial mother (Evans 205).

I would argue that Verne also places a special emphasis on those characteristics of the symbolic that may be attributed to its masculinist logic. Essentially, I argue that Verne‘s (and

Lem‘s) predominantly male characters make use of the logic of signification to apprehend the feminine Thing with new innovations in psychology and technology. This pursuit of the feminized, mythical Thing is represented in their fictions as an obsessional desire for scientific knowledge. But why does Verne place such an emphasis on scientific didacticism?

As Isabelle Jan and Wyley L. Powell explain, the era of children‘s literature in which

Verne was writing was very much defined by educational institutions as the secular arm of a paternal authority that regulated a child‘s proper entrance into society. French society foremost promoted the ―unquestionable omnipotence [and sacredness] of the family unit,‖ as the highest value. But this reverence of the family is also merged with the reverence for the learned man.

Education becomes a sign of elite bourgeois culture which helps defines the proper male subject

(Jan and Powell 65). Jan and Powell discover this by studying the ways in which the schoolmaster, because his instruction takes place in the home, becomes a ―double of the father,‖

(65). This relationship helps promote the sacred association of the school as a ―magic place‖ in

French children‘s literature, through which the subject learns how to fulfill his or her ―highest destiny,‖ through the knowledge of the paternal figure (Jan and Powell 65–66). Jules Verne‘s fiction is in many ways characteristic of this period because of the influence of his publisher,

Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Hetzel, who becomes a father figure and loving (if stern and often officious) colleague to Verne, attempts to profit from the sacred bonding of the school and family by advocating for a new children‘s novel which will, in the words of Hetzel‘s announcement for the

new book series Extraordinary Voyages in which Verne‘s novels would be published, ―sum up all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science,‖ (Butcher x).

Jan and Powell note that Hetzel profits from this bond by insuring that his desire to create a new type of novel for children is coupled with an ideological interest to complement the sacred right of instruction which is primarily ―the preserve of the family,‖ (Jan and Powell 65–66). It is not surprising, I propose, that Verne‘s protagonists are predominantly young men taken under the guidance of a more powerful paternal figure who represents an order of knowledge outside their own. Take, for instance, the protagonist in Journey to the Center of the Earth, Axel. Axel is an adolescent boy whose passion for knowledge is inspired by the insistence of his esteemed uncle/professor Otto Lidenbrock. While Verne‘s characters are not always biologically adolescent (for example, Aronnax, Dr. Clawbonny, or Passepartout) they are often (like

Aronnax) taken on as "pupils" who follow domineering male figures into the mysteries of the unknown (Maertens 211).

We can observe in Verne‘s biographical background that this new model of jouissance, and the obsessional structure it drives, is based on the ability to signify and apprehend the mysteries of the universe through the language of science and mathematical models that accompanies the emergence of modern technoscientific practice. This is key: Verne is educating a new generation of patriarchal subjects who will not base their masculinity on outdated ideals of physical brawn and violent conquest but rather on a masculinity defined by intellectual refinement and education, and a commitment to a particular expression of these things.

However, Jan and Powell stress that while Verne did follow Hetzel‘s suggestions to write didactic children‘s fiction, he did so only in tandem with his own designs as a writer and artist

(Jan and Powell 69). His fiction is more complex than Hetzel‘s marketing schemes would seem to suggest – they are accessible to children as well as adults (Jan and Powell 69). The classic and modern literary references in Verne, as well as his obsessional readings of the most modern scientific sources of his time, point to his understanding of mythic canon as well as a consciousness of the new scientific innovations which changed his society‘s perception of the world around them (Unwin 13).2 His subsequent inscription of scientific discourse is didactic for children, but also contains a more complex significance as a literature which attempts to apply scientific knowledge in the face of deadly human dilemmas, existential crises, and sexual anxieties. Could it be that Verne is also using these systems of signification to redefine the masculine subject of his own generation? Given that his readership included – and still includes

– many adult readers, I suggest that Verne is educating an older generation in the virtues and vices of this new form of phallic jouissance based on intellectual-scientific signification of which physical mastery is a secondary virtue.

Jan and Powell take issue, however, with Hetzel's adherence to a model of acceptable social hierarchy in which only education is revered and promoted as the highest destiny of man.

They argue that this creates a professional hierarchy: the learned man [scholar], the soldier; and the manual worker. These theorists point to a central conflict in French children‘s literature during this period concerning social prejudice based on education. Bourgeois children were diligently taught that the only professions which lead to self-fulfillment or honor were based in the cultural elite (67). As Jacob Maetens points out, this hierarchy of competing masculinities is made the subject of Verne‘s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Here archetypes of masculinity based on physical strength/tactile knowledge (Ned Land) are put in competition

2 Magazines such as Le Magasin pittoresque, Le Musée des familles, Le Tour du monde, and La Revue illustrée.

and cooperation with the new technologically advanced, scholarly man (Captain Nemo). The image of society in these fictions also excludes the feminine subject from the scene of characters‘ agency and potentially dangerous journeys, seemingly on purpose as a way to escape the feminine presence (Maertens 218-219).

Stanisław Lem: Obsessional Neuroses and Hysterical Anxieties

Lem‘s famous devotion to literary and scientific publications, as well as his indefatigable resolve to exhaust the speculative properties of the sf genre and its critical counterpart, marks him as one of the remaining mad geniuses of the twentieth century. A child prodigy, with a somewhat neurotic interest in academic pursuits, Lem‘s interests led him to practice as a medical professional as well as to produce a vast canon of distinctive literature across multiple genres

(―Reflections‖ 6–7). He is perhaps best known for his contributions to sf; his unique synthesis of weighty philosophical speculation and scientific didacticism is unique within the genre

(Csicsery-Ronay 145). In this regard, Verne and Lem share an attraction to minutia of scientific theory as catalysts for speculative engagement and identity formation. Lem‘s characters are always defined by their scientific professions: cyberneticists, engineers, doctors, physicists, and astronauts are his protagonists. While Lem is a self-proclaimed empiricist who revolts at the (in his opinion) simplifying tools of fiction, he nevertheless uses the form of the sf novel to catalogue human experience. Lem is seduced by the form of sf because of its ability to deal with

―human beings as a species.‖ Excellent sf should then deal with the entirety of the species, ―not just with specific individuals, be they saints or monsters,‖ (―Reflections‖ 12). In the context of this essay, I interpret this statement as Lem‘s attempt to answer the obsessional neurotic question, what am I? The complicating factor in these works is that whenever Lem‘s characters

ask themselves these questions, they must first answer, what is man? The implicit gendered nature of this question is indicated by a lack in Lem‘s fiction of female protagonists (within the boundaries of acceptable society, a society which is not defined as radically other) who ask this question.

Looking at Lem‘s autobiographical background, his drive to understand human nature may have been triggered by his desire to understand the irrational and traumatic General

Government Occupation of Poland during WWII. As Hayden White observes when speaking about the depictions of the Holocaust, the process of ―telling a story, however truthful, about... traumatic events might very well provide a kind of ‗intellectual mastery‘ of the anxiety which the memory of their occurrence may incite in an individual or a community,‖ (32). While Hayden‘s theory speaks directly to writerly practices of modernism, his proposal might be helpful in a study of Lem‘s sf. Lem admits in his autobiography that his central task as an author has been formed by a drive to ―reconcile the contradictory elements of realism and fantasy,‖ which seems to suggest that he symbolically inscribes real events in sf (―Reflections‖ 1). If the traumatic events of the Holocaust and the Soviet dominion over Poland have influenced Lem‘s fiction, as his autobiography suggests (and critics have widely observed), then it may be helpful in our attempts to understand the repression of the abject in Lem‘s novels as a way to repress traumatic memories (encounters with the Real) or deal with them by inscribing them (much like trauma memory functions) into fantasy. His attempts to use sf to study human beings as a species, ―be they humans or monsters,‖ suggests he is traumatized by the potential for abjection which he first sees as a result of exposure to the war. In fact, he describes his attempts to deal with trauma by expelling ―the weight of [his] war memories… like a pus‖ into his novel The Hospital of

Transfiguration (―Reflections‖ 14). However, he states that this might have served to calcify

these memories further. In any case, Lem‘s drive to expel the abject, and the same time recover the Real, comes through in his constant discussion of characters who attempt to find the traumatic Real Thing (das Ding) once they are faced with an experience of abjection which is expressed in feminized terms.

Lem‘s male characters are typically terrified and destabilized by their own potential for derangement, evil, or oppression. As in Eden (1959) and Fiasco (1987), the central conflict in

Lem‘s fiction is his male characters‘ fear that they will dominate another society in attempting to save it from its own agenda of mass genocide and atomic war. These characters realize that any action on their part would only be interpreted as an act of oppression by the foreign culture. The

Lem novels which are the principal subjects of this project – Return From the Stars (1980) and

Solaris (1961) – should not be taken as WWII literature. However, they do contain a significant fixation with repression and trauma in which the true horror of the abject is the male‘s unconscious desire for domination of the Other. Here the Thing which Lemian characters search for is real in that it is a traumatic Real.

Lem‘s characters share a trait of Vernian characters, the drive to try and find a rational explanation for irrational elements of the Thing, because the lost Thing must be continually refound in order to fill the lack on which the symbolic realm is articulated. However, signification always reduces – leaves out or aside – some aspects of the Real. After the failure of the sexual relationship, there is only an imaginary relationship between subjects, a remainder which is the property of the jouissance of the body (Verhaeghe 111). This jouissance of the body bears a striking similarity to Kristeva‘s formation of the pre-linguistic maternal semiotic which functions in a direct understanding by a dual relationship. This jouissance of the body may have something to do with woman in Lacan (to the extent that she may experience it but doesn‘t

understand it), but it has nothing to do with sexual difference. It is asexual in so far as it is not of the phallic order of signification. It is situated in that place where the Other is not-whole (the place where language/signification fails). But even Lacan seems to indulge in a language of the archaic mother as the monstrous-feminine. He does not describe this Other of the body except in that he states that it has something to do with Being - the processes of life, death, reproduction, and infinity (111–112).

Here, Slavoj Žižek‘s formulation of the ―Thing as the Space (the sacred/forbidden Zone) in which the gap between the Symbolic and the Real is closed‖ is relevant (par. 2). He describes it as a place where ―our desires are directly materialized‖ (Žižek par.2). Žižek‘s dictum demonstrates that the desire for the Thing is a desire to define (without reducing) the material world around us through the symbolic realm, even as this is impossible. Similarly, in Verne and

Lem‘s fictions, this Thing/space is always impossible or unknowable.

Maps of the Masculine Libido

This Thing is often represented as a physical space in Verne and Lem‘s fiction. Both authors send their protagonists on explorations to find this unknown/uninhabited space in order to master it through the act of symbolic appellation or description. The narrative purpose of these explorations is to articulate the process of apprehension. The use of the word apprehension here invokes its various meanings in relation to the Other: 1) to understand the meaning of; 2) express anxiety or fear of; and 3) to arrest or possess legally or physically. The threats/opportunity present in the these meetings with the Other are always a way in which to express dominance or mastery. This is often represented by a physical struggle with the monstrous-feminine in which the men attempt to conquer feminized forces (as embodied by nature or geological formations).

I have also emphasized intellectual mastery as a way of mentally arresting alterities in

Verne and Lem‘s fictions because they seem to be fixated on a new intellectually based model of masculine-identity formation. Michel Serres and Maria Malanchuk also speculate that this emphasis on apprehension becomes more cognitive-intellectual as the physical/temporal mysteries of spaces are physically apprehended/conquered by modern technology and science which collapses space and time (174–75). In essence, these spaces become mapped (which is just a form of converting them to spaces of signification). The problem of discovery in any exploration (now physical or cognitive) is then always a problem of using rational-scientific logic to answer the question, what is the essence/significance of these terrestrial mysteries? In attempting to comprehend the spaces that surround us, Verne and Lem describe the emergence of a new type of masculine story told through didactic texts and literature, in which the individual becomes mature after a scientific exploration of the dangerous world his father dares to posses.

This is fundamentally a shift from maturation based on physical development/brawn to a mental maturation.

As such, the neurotic question is a question of how to document these new material spaces into language as a way to contain/conquer them: ―to every problem concerning space corresponds a problem of index and reference,‖ (Serres and Malanchuk 180). As we will see in a discussion of Verne‘s Journey, when this problem is unsolvable the meeting with radical alterity results in the loss of speech: the inability of the author and the characters to articulate what they are seeing. The characters feel a powerful sense of ecstasy and anxiety in these situations. These apprehensions can be severe – we can describe them as a crises of existential identity in which the masculine subject questions the integrity and validity of its ego and life in the symbolic realm.

The desire to signify the unknown through language even when the experience of this exploration is a physical, tactile one of foreign terrains is very much a passion inspired by the age in which Verne was living. Indeed, Verne‘s studies of ―geography, geology and astronomy in relation to the great world explorations‖ are always a way of asserting an intellectual dominance of the (European) ―white man‖ who assumes an ethnological role in ―pointing out the presence on every continent of … the civilized Occidental manifesting everywhere the supremacy‖ of his knowledge, intellect, energy and drive (Jan and Powell 69). This presence is as much intellectual as it is physical. Mark Rose further explains the immense opportunity for scientific/geographical discovery in Verne‘s time by reminding us that the North Pole, the bottom of the sea, and the center of the Earth were still untouched mysteries; they represented in several respects the very ideals of the blanks on the map of the discovered world that obsessed nineteenth century explorers (123). Verne‘s desire to map these mysteries is not a nostalgic longing for the blank regions of the past, but rather the expression of an active desire to signify – that is, to make significant – unmarked spaces. We see the expression of this fervor in The

Adventures of Captain Hatteras. This novel follows a monomaniacal British explorer, Captain

Hatteras, whose mad march towards the North Pole consumes the whole of his being; he is described as pure automaton with no identity outside of this driven agency. Hatteras‘ automatism can also be thought of in the Lacanian sense of the term: Hatteras has no function but to act as ―a pure network of signifiers‖ which seeks to draw into itself the unnamed Pole. Here the Pole is unnamed as it has not yet been claimed as a territory by any national power. Hatteras‘s mission is driven by his desire to claim the territory as British and plant the flag upon it. Given his mad tendency towards signification, we can think of Hatteras as an embodiment of the masculine- signifying libido. His only desire is to place his flag (an expression of abstract thought and

signified identity) on the Pole. The pole also has a mythical connotation as one of the only still places (along with the South Pole and the center of the Earth) on the turning globe (Rose 123).

As such, the pole represents the boundaries between deep space and civilization. It is the boundary line between ―human space – the habitable world‖ and the harsh, barren, ―non-human space of the infinite,‖ (Rose, 123). In other words, the Pole is an abject space because it threatens humanity with its radical alterity.

For Lem the desire for exploration is triggered by introduction of the idea of STR

(strategic technological revolution) into the communist ideology of the Soviet Union. As a Polish subject who lived under the oppressive influence of the Soviet Union, this revision allowed him to participate in a discussion of (though not direct contact with) space exploration (Csicsery-

Ronay 145). However, his authorial voice is often critical of the Soviet space program and the potential of space exploration to be just another way for oppressive regimes to assert their dominance in the political sphere through the conquering of physical space. His work often casts outdated archetypes of patriarchal exploration (figurative ―Knights of the Holy Contact‖) into space as they attempt to reassert their masculine presence in a foreign terrain (Helford 167).

Space exploration in Lem‘s fiction, while it is always described with a sense of wonder, is also haunted by the imperious intent behind the act of expansion.

When Verne and Lem‘s characters are unable to find a signifier for the Others they encounter, this produces anxiety, fear, and horror. The result of this experience is that the characters are affected by a sense of existential dread in which the death of the ego – the moment in which a set masculinity risks losing itself – occurs. Losing this sense of ego is represented by the loss of one‘s faculties or reason. This happens to Hatteras at the end of his adventure. Upon reaching the edge of the North Pole and realizing he will never set foot on its exact location (it is

not solid ground but the opening of an active volcano) Hatteras goes mad. Unable to fulfill his masculinist agenda to associate the space of the pole to a signifier (the British flag), he becomes a soulless body, ending up his life forever marching towards the Pole in a mental asylum.

The Archaic Mother in Verne: Journey to the Center of the Earth

We can see the blending of masculine libido/identity with scientific didacticism in

Verne‘s Journey to the Center of the Earth. In this novel, the process of scientific exploration is depicted as rite of passage which has more to do with the masturbatory pleasure of phallic jouissance than with apprehension of the feminine jouissance of the body (of the infinite). This rite of passage must be completed for the adolescent subject in the novel (Axel) to be accepted into the symbolic order of the father. To clarify, the male subjects of this novel attempt to find the Thing of the real by returning to the inner spaces of Earth. In attempting to reach/name this impossible Thing, they ultimately fail. I attribute this failure, in part, with these characters‘ depiction of this Thing as a monstrous femininity, effectively placing them back into the symbolic realm which is founded on sexual difference.

I should further emphasize that Verne is not concerned with the depiction of sexual/romantic relationships between men and women – topics of this nature are rare and at most function to introduce brief love themes and tie up loose plot ends. 3 Rather, Verne‘s fiction is invested in the ways in which a subject‘s ability to engage with rational/scientific language becomes a necessary tenant of modern, intellectual masculinity. He is concerned with how this identity becomes central to assuming one‘s proper place in the patriarchal line.

3 For instance, the figure of Aouda in Around the World in Eighty Days is mostly an ancillary character. Her main purpose is to cement Fogg‘s position in London as a respectable gentleman through marriage. This subdues any social suspicion surrounding his reclusive and unstable bachelorhood.

The plot of Journey follows Axel, his uncle Professor Otto Lidenbrock, and their

Icelandic guide Hans as they attempt to reach the center of the Earth. This mission is set in motion when Lidenbrock finds a note from the medieval Icelandic alchemist, Arne Saknussem.

Saknussem asserts that there is a passageway to the center and that he has already succeeded in reaching it. Axel, who is madly in love with his uncle‘s ward Graüben, agrees to the adventure once Graüben promises to wed him on his return. Upon entering the Earth through an extinct volcano, the men discover that inner Earth is a fecund landscape surrounding an immense, womb-like sea. However, the entrance to the innermost depths of the center is blocked and must be forced open with explosives. This forced entry triggers a volcanic reaction which vomits the explorers back out to the surface of the Earth. Axel returns to marry Graüben and Professor

Lidenbrock gains international fame within the scientific community for his discoveries.

Peter Brooks attaches little importance to the discussions of sexual difference in Verne‘s fiction because he believes that children‘s literature is too heavily censored to allow topics of this nature. Instead, he believes that sexual desire is sublimated to pursuits in intellectual fulfillment

(8). Here I would disagree, as I have already shown that the boundaries separating the intellectual and psychosexual identity of an individual are significantly undermined at the period of children‘s literature in which he is writing. It is not that the sexual daemons which concern adult literature are absent in Verne, but rather that these daemons are represented symbolically – most often through the presence of a void (the monstrous-feminine). As such, the geological depictions of abysses, chasms, and maelstroms in Verne are indicative of the voracious emptiness/fullness of the mother‘s womb. Contrary to Brooks‘ assertion that children‘s literature is ―by definition pure, morally uplifting and innocent,‖ Verne‘s Journey is provocative for its horrific depiction of the monstrous-feminine (11). Brooks, even as he affirms that ―the writer is

psychologically free to use [children‘s literature] for a maximal liberation of his inner life,‖ downplays Verne‘s fixation with masculine gender construction and patriarchal apprehensions

(11).

To better understand how the patriarchal inscription of the monstrous-feminine in Verne is represented, it would be helpful to enumerate the author‘s primary depictions of femininity.

Here I would posit that Verne‘s central obsession is not with the feminities as represented in what I call ―the apprehended mother/maid‖ figure and the love object, which are already inscribed in the phallic economy of the symbolic realm. Rather, Verne‘s obsession lies with the sublime properties of the archaic mother as embodied in the material forms of nature. Unlike the archaic mother, the love object and the apprehended maid never incite terror or existential dread in the male subjects of Verne‘s fiction. Martha, the household maid in Journey, at best serves as a comedic character; she is there to absorb the impatience of Professor Lidenbrock as he obsesses over the mysteries of geological science. Similarly, Graüben (Axel‘s love object) seems bereft of any independent agency in the novel (an agency which distinguishes Verne‘s male characters in Journey). Though Axel describes Graüben as a sensible, intelligent pupil of geological science (thus allowing her access to phallic jouissance), her jouissance is limited to the realm of the home and the family as her major achievement is to become a wife.4 Here

Graüben is not our model of femininity as defined by Freud. Masculinity is taken by Freud as the paradigm; he asserts that there is only one libido, which is masculine and is common to both girls and boys. However, girls eventually diverge from this masculine paradigm. Femininity is then that which diverges, and Freud regards it as a ―mysterious, unexplored region‖ and a ―dark continent,‖ (Evans 219). This leads Freud to ask the hysteric question, what does woman want? I

4 This confinement of the woman‘s phallic jouissance to the roles of wife and mother is documented as a historical trend by Colette Soler (Barnard 49).

would argue that Verne instead, and perhaps despite his attachment to a certain logic of masculinity, asks the Lacanian question, what is femininity?

This absence of a masculine libido in female characters, which drives exploration, is a troubling trend in both Lem and Verne‘s fiction.5 While women in these novels demonstrate a certain autonomy in social spheres, they are often barred from exploring grander existential questions that involve the presence of foreign dangers. These dangers are represented by a feminine jouissance which is both a part of them but a part which is unknowable to them or to others: ―feminine jouissance goes beyond the phallus‖ and is ―of the order of the infinite‖ which is like ―mystical ecstasy,‖ (Evans 220). The responsibility of finding the feminine jouissance

(monstrous femininity as described later on) is designated as a masculine privilege in Journey.

Graüben explains: ―a poor girl would only be in the way,‖ (Journey 34). This is a terribly problematic precedent for Verne to set: it bars the woman from apprehending a jouissance that others have described as essential to her. But let us look at the ways in which Axel and our other patriarchal hopefuls fail in the presence of this jouissance.

Axel, in order to become a whole and proper masculine subject, must first prove himself capable of meeting with the dangers of the abject as represented by the Unheimlich of the natural terrain outside of civilization. Graüben makes this clear when she persuades Axel to follow his uncle: ―a man should try to prove himself by some great adventure!‖ (Journey 34). As such, his impetus for the journey (the desire to wed Graüben) becomes a path to the adult world. Very much the indifferent adolescent, Axel does not identify with his uncle‘s masculinist desire to signify the world around him. To do so he must first identify with Lidenbrock as a specular image of the ego; he must share the scientist‘s obsessive passion to get to the core of the Earth.

5 This is an omission Verne is quick to remedy in his later works such as Le Superbe Orénoque (1897) and Le Rayon Vert (1882).

This identification will allow Axel to enter into the symbolic realm which defines the male subject through his identification with the signifying paternal law of the phallus.

As Terry Harpold has argued, Journey can be read as a rewriting of the Oedipal cycle in which Axel desires to apprehend the maternal body (represented by the strange, negative space of the inner Earth) which gives precedence to Saknussem. Following this logic, Professor

Lidenbrock‘s desire for scientific enlightenment in the exploration of the feminized body is a desire to possess the knowledge of the father (Saknussem). In this regard, Lidenbrock (like

Aronnax in Twenty Thousand Leagues) is a character who follows the Promethean complex, first described by Gaston Bachelard, in which the wish to have the father‘s knowledge is also a wish to have the symbolic phallus (sign and instrument of his power) (Maertens, 211). This is more evident when we understand that Verne is marking the female sex in geological/terrestrial formations while constructing universal male characters. As Simone de Beauvoir has argued, the feminine sex is the only actively marked one, in that the masculine is presumed to be the universal and all-present foundation of gender.

Verne explicitly uses the language of female anatomy to describe the volcanic formation which serves as Axel‘s entrance into the Earth (the fecund womb in which he will find a variety of organic life forms). This volcanic formation is none other than Iceland‘s Snaeffels mountain whose ―double cones‖ mimic the shape of a woman‘s breasts. Verne goes at length to explain that the mountain formed from a trappean massif which became a ―wide slit‖ as magma continually poured from it. He also describes the hardened formations of this magma as

―mammary bulges‖ (Journey 77). Lastly, the cinders and scoria of these formations are (for

Verne), ―long spread-out rivulets‖ which rest on the mountain‘s ―shoulders like an opulent head of hair,‖ (Journey 77).

In attempting to conquer this geographical/terrestrial mother, the explorers are always threatened by the potential for death. As Terry Harpold has discovered, Axel‘s quotation of

Antigone‘s final anxieties is his expression of the fear of dying before experiencing the pleasures of the marriage bed. Antigone faces death sentence because she chooses to honor her duty to her brother instead of to the state (the symbolic order). Because of this, Antigone will be wed with

Pluto.

Of course, the abjection which Axel must signify (ritually defile) in order to suppress it is the body of the archaic mother and his desire for this mother. Axel‘s ability to distinguish the abject from the proper, (or the meaningless from the meaningful) is what allows him to survive his journey. In travelling beyond the confines of the Heimlich patriarchal society which structures his existence, Axel risks losing his ability to distinguish the authority of the mother from the authority of the father. The power of the proper here is dependent on this ability to name which is which. By becoming intoxicated with the tenderness of this abyssal mother, Axel risks entering the realm of her order in which nature renders everything (including the self) meaningless. In other words, he risks psychic and physical death. While the fear of the consequences of incest do come partially from the fear of the predecessor, Axel‘s chief fear is not the wrath of Saknussem, but rather the fear of experiencing psychic death in the face of the feminine Other.

During the adventure, Lidenbrock and Hans function to oversee Axel's maturation into a set model of masculinity which rejects the attraction to the abyss by resisting the death drive. To resist this drive, Axel must learn to embody the best characteristics of Hans and Lidenbrock‘s differing types of masculinities. When we first encounter Axel, his movements are very much the clumsy and unpracticed movements of an adolescent boy. He is repeatedly saved by Hans, an

archetype of masculinity based on brawn, and – less frequently but equally decisively – by his

Uncle who represents the new intellectual masculinity of the 19th century. Lidenbrock is able to save Axel through his preternatural knowledge of geological science and his techniques for overcoming the maternal abject (the abyss). Axel gets his first lesson in dealing with this experience from Lidenbrock when they visit the church of Vor Frelsers Kirke. In this episode,

Lidenbrock says that Axel must climb to the top for his ―lessons in precipices!‖ (Journey 44).

What Verne actually says here is that Axel needs lessons in abîmes, abysses (this meaning is lost in Butcher‘s translation). Given our earlier discussion of the inscription of the abject maternal as a ―primeval hole‖ or a void, the meaning of the original French is highly significant. Axel‘s resulting loss of spatial reason, as well as the threat of unconsciousness, hints to the reader that he is in danger of losing his identity. It is not that this landscape is supposed to be a representation of the monstrous-feminine, but rather that Lidenbrock is preparing Axel for this encounter with a model which mimics the real experience. This test prepares Axel for the space- sickness and loss of spatial and mental mastery he will feel upon meeting with the archaic mother (Journey 43-44).

Hans, a familiar model of masculinity defined by excessive strength and an intrepidity in the face of the abject, serves to shame Axel into continuing his rite of passage.When looking at the entrance into the bowels of the Earth (in the crater of Snaeffels), Axel is terrified by its fathomless depth. But once he spots Hans‘ resolve and confidence, Axel feels ashamed to turn back in his presence (Journey 86). Hans also serves to physically pull Axel out of the abject mother and to pull him back into the symbolic order of the phallus. Rendered helpless when faced with the tender attraction of the abyss during this same episode, Axel feels as if he will fall

into its intoxicating and dizzying meaninglessness. However, just as he loses control over his desires, Hans‘ hand reaches out to grab him in time.

Axel‘s transition from indifferent adolescent to adult occurs when he identifies with the professor‘s intense, ―passionate subjectivity‖ (Butcher, xxiv). This moment occurs in the episode in which Axel identifies with Lidenbrock‘s mad desire to penetrate the inner depths of the Earth with explosives. During this scene, Axel becomes so consumed by the desire to break through to the center of the mother‘s body that he forgets about his love for Graüben (Journey 194). His excuse for this lack of devotion to his fiancée is that he feels he is ―submerged... in the bosom of

[this] spheroid,‖ (Journey 194). This moment can be read as a sexual awakening in which Axel projects his libidinal desires onto the maternal body. This explosion, however, ultimately unleashes the archaic mother‘s vengeance upon the explorers. The explorers only narrowly escape the deadly, consuming force of the maelstrom which is inadvertently triggered during this scene.

The Threats of the Abject Mother: Death and its Significance

Axel‘s fear of being consumed by the archaic-abject mother is reiterated throughout the novel. One of the most significant portents of this mortal danger is the leper which Axel encounters near Snaeffels. As Butcher points out, the inspiration for this figure most likely stems from Poe‘s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Butcher xviii). In Poe‘s story, two young adolescents (Arthur and his childhood friend Augustus) embark on a voyage which leads to a series of horrific events. Here the depiction of Augustus‘s rotting limbs and their detachment from his body – due to advanced mortification – represents a severing of both life and the masculine rite of passage.

Similarly, Verne‘s leper represents the fear of the death of the masculine ego – the severing of sexual development due its the inability to break away from the space of the archaic mother. Because the leper lingers at the peninsula near the entrance to the body of the abject mother (Snaeffels), he is mentally associated with the maternal landscape which threatens the borders of the Icelandic civilization (patriarchal society). As Axel reminds us, this area carries a mythic significance for the Icelandic peoples as a site of ―supernatural horror,‖ (Journey 63).

Axel himself perceives it as a place ―where the damage wrought by an impulsive Nature forms a fearsome chaos,‖ (63). As Axel goes further into this space, it is clear that he describes it as a purgatory; that region between the hellish dangers of the center and the comforting embraces of civilization. It is at this nexus where Axel cannot help but feel a ―sudden disgust‖ towards the leper and its ―swollen head with shiny skin devoid of hair and repulsive wounds showing through... miserable rags,‖ (Journey 68). Axel‘s description of the leper‘s horrible profile is wrought with the polluting, excremental objects which gain association with maternal authority through toilet training.

Because of this, we can think of the leper as a representation (for the masculine subject) of the partially constituted subject of the symbolic who cannot separate from the mother. As

Barbara Creed reminds us, the source of horror in this abjection is (as defined by patriarchal civilizations) the fear that the maternal order will replace patriarchy as the legitimate authority or power in a subject‘s formation. Because of this, Axel‘s perception of the leper works as a ritual of defilement which separates ―the human from the non•human and the fully constituted subject from the partially formed subject,‖ (35). To preserve the purity and safety of the patriarchal line, the leper is prohibited from marrying. He is an abjection which the explorers sympathize with, but are nevertheless horrified by.

The Tenderness of the Abyss: Desire as Life and Death (Drive)

The fear of falling into the abyss is an anxiety which is expressed by Virgil (The Aeneid),

Baudelaire (Les Fleurs Du Mal) and Dante (The Inferno) – it has a long established significance as the imaginary opening into the underworld (Butcher, xvii Journey). Butcher has highlighted that Verne‘s notion of the abyss follows in the footsteps of this canon. As such, the abject mother

(as abyss) also connotes the Underworld.

At a basic narrative level, characters fixated with the abyss dream of an excruciating death in which they are consumed alive by a gaping void. This happens just as they embark on a new journey of terrestrial mastery. As Axel describes it, this experience is one in which the self becomes a ―creature of delirium.‖ In one dream in particular, Axel imagines himself occupying the non-habitable space (the Pole) which we have said that Hatteras can never reach. Axel feels himself ―falling to the bottom of unfathomable pits with the increasing speed of bodies abandoned in space.‖ Once the self has been disintegrated in these dreams, Axel feels that his

―life [is] just one endless fall,‖ (Journey 37–38).

Here a Freudian interpretation of the ways in which night terrors and anxiety dreams function as wish-fulfillment helps us understand Axel‘s experience. According to Freud, individuals filter unacceptable desires by repressing them, shifting them from conscious to unconscious dream states. Though the subject may perceive these dreams as nightmares in his/her conscious state, the latent content of dreams is always a way in which the subject fulfills an unrecognized desire.

We have already seen Axel‘s unconscious desire to merge with the archaic mother in his intoxication with the abyss. This drive towards the maternal body is also described as an ecstasy.

In this way, it is the process of desiring this feminized Thing (the pleasure/reality principle) which is the site of a subject‘s pleasure, and not the actual attainment (the attainment of this jouissance in Lacanian theory is perceived as suffering/evil by the subject). This reality principle is made evident in the episode in which Axel conquers his space-sickness when climbing on top of the Snaeffels summit. Axel describes this experience as a ―high-blown ecstasy‖ which is brought on by his engagement in ―sublime contemplations,‖ (Journey 80). These contemplations are in fact a type of daydream in which Axel fulfills his wish to identify with the mythical mother. As he dreams this, his unity with the mother leads him to lose his individuality: ―I forgot who I was, where I was, and lived the life of elves and sylphs, the imaginary inhabitants of

Scandinavian mythology,‖ (Journey 80). To further our discourse of this seemingly paradoxical combination of death and life drives in Axel, a discussion of the Lacanian notion of infinity (as a part of the jouissance of the body) is necessary.

In Lacanian theory the life and death drives are two sides of the same coin; both are constitutive of the drive towards psychic death in order to reach a state of being past the pleasure principle which is impossible to articulate. Like his idea of infinity, this jouissance’s unbound process of energy cannot be ―discharged through the use of words,‖ (Verhaeghe 115). This state of being resembles the unity and dual relationship of the child with the mother in the imaginary realm. Though Verne is writing in an era before psychoanalysis left its mark, I would argue that his projection of both anxiety and desire on the metonyms of the archaic mother and the feminine sublime uncannily anticipate Lacan‘s formulation of the infinite jouissance of the Other. This desire to escape the sexual difference of the symbolic realm appears again in Verne‘s Twenty

Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869).

In this novel the desire to know the body of the mother (la mère, homonymic with la mer, the sea) is an explicit desire to return to the imaginary unity with the Pre-Oedipal mother

(Maertens 219). This is best elucidated in the moment in which the protagonist, Professor

Aronnax, dreams of being a mollusk. The invocation of the mollusk here is taken to be a

―complex symbolism of devouring and uterine enclosure,‖ (Maertens 219). As James W.

Maertens argues, Arronax's dream should be viewed as the fulfillment of his ―masculine desire to be free of the feminine world of relatedness‖ while simultaneously returning to ―the omnipotent

‗magical thinking‘ of the Pre-Oedipal state, or to the womb itself.‖ (222). This world of relatedness is special because of its rejection of the sexual difference which upholds the legitimacy of the symbolic order. Because of this, the death of the ego in its consumption by the jouissance of the Body is never a final death, but instead a path to a different type of being. This desire to get past the question of the hysteric can be thought of as a depiction of obsessional neuroses which is a way for the subject to negate its alienation by ignoring the existence of sexual difference (Evans 126).

In Journey, Lidenbrock and Axel search for the answer to the question, what is at the center? But this journey is also one in which the explorers travel back into the primordial past the deeper they go – that is, as they journey into the body of the mother (Rose 124). The archaic mother is not the mother of the Pre-Oedipal imaginary realm, she is an aspect of the Thing, a figure of undifferentiated – unsignified – being which cannot be known because she is beyond both the imaginary and the symbolic (Evans 205). In attempting to disprove the idea that the center is made of molten lava and eternal fires, the explorers are tacitly implying that they think there might be an answer to the question, where do I come from? This is just another way to ask the obsessional question of identity: why do I exist? However, any possible answers to this

question given to Axel during the exploration are rejected by him because he has formed a notion of masculinity based on identification with the proper, patriarchal subject which defines itself by its separation from the mother. Axel is horrified when he comes across the missing link (the antediluvian man) in the depths of the Earth. This figure is abject because it is a subject formed completely in relation to the semiotic of the mother – Axel refuses to accept that it is a ―real‖ man. This primal man is not the partially formed abjection we saw earlier in the figure of the leper – the antediluvian man is something far more horrific for patriarchies. Upon looking at this gigantic, primal man, Axel undergoes an existential crisis in which he refuses to believe that a

―human creature lives in that underground world,‖ (Journey 187). He goes further and says that

―no race of men populates those deep caverns unconcerned with the inhabitants of the surface, not communicating with them in any way!‖ (Journey 187). In other words, the horror of the primal man is that it ―speaks‖ through the maternal semiotic. Axel refuses that such a thing is possible: ―It‘s insane, deeply insane!‖ (187). For this reason the semiotic of the material body, the Thing of the real, often leaves Axel and the other men speechless.

Despite its abject nature, this prehistorical Thing is seen as ‗the cause of the most fundamental human passion,‖ which ―in the real suffers from the signifier,‖ (Evans 205). Verne‘s fiction is advanced in its questioning of existence, and for its continual disavowal of the omnipotence of the symbolic (patriarchal) law. His characters learn quickly that there are unknowable mysteries of existence which cannot be conquered through signification. The explorers never get to the core of the Earth. In essence, Verne struggles to depict the almost- meeting with the jouissance of radical alterity outside of patriarchal language. Though his mystification of the feminine body and his lack of female characters who possess a masculine libido is problematic, Verne‘s fiction is still opposed to engaging in a typical abjection of the

female subject, as such. The physical apprehension of female characters in Verne is never overtly promoted or legitimized but rather de-emphasized or deplored. 6

Lem and Lack: Solaris

The myth of the monstrous-feminine (as embodied in geological/terrestrial forms) is also carried through in Lem‘s novel Solaris. Here, the uterine ocean on the planet Solaris is perceived as a monstrous femininity by a patriarchal society who studies it obsessively in order to apprehend its maddeningly enigmatic presence.

The novel follows psychologist Kris Kelvin as he lands on the last station devoted to studying the living ocean. Upon arriving at the Solaris station, Kris discovers his mentor

(Gibarian) has committed suicide and that the station is in a disheveled state. Kris is then visited by a replica of his deceased wife, Harey, who committed suicide on Earth years earlier. He soon learns that this creature is not his wife, but in fact a simulation created by Solaris after the crew attacked the ocean with potentially lethal X-rays. Kris and his fellow crewmates, Snaut and

Sartorius, struggle to deal with these alluring and horrifying visitors. In a desperate effort to contact the ocean, Kris beams his thoughts (encoded in X-rays) at the ocean. Meanwhile, the simulacrum Harey commits suicide with the aid of the other scientists. The novel ends with Kris forever hoping for new signs of contact from the ocean.

Lem‘s decision to describe radical alterity with the language of the monstrous-feminine may stem from his own early adolescent anxieties concerning the female body. Though Lem overcomes these anxieties and eventually becomes a gynecologist, he recounts that that female genitalia had always seemed ―spider-like‖ to him (―Reflections‖ 6). Of course spiders have long been used to represent the uncanny and the abject. In any case, this abjection of maternal/female

6 Verne passionately deplores the kidnapping of a young woman in The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (1910).

bodies is a rampant tendency of the crew, who can only perceive the ocean as a giant womb in trying to understand its radical alterity. However, the novel reiterates that the ocean is unknowable – therefore any gender classification of the ocean is an inherently false attempt to anthropomorphize something which is indescribable.

The Solaricists‘ experience of the ocean is similar to Axel‘s experience of the archaic mother. This depiction of the masculine psyche (which cannot help but see the maternal/creational as abject) serves to highlight the anxiety surrounding female sexuality/anatomy in patriarchal societies. As in Journey, femininity is directly associated with motherhood. In particular, the ocean‘s continual rebirth and replication of itself through

―ontological autometamorphosis‖ is described using the language of maternity. Its mimoid formations, which mimic anything in proximity, attach themselves to each other by ―umbilical cords.‖ When these creational processes end abruptly, the ocean is described as undergoing a

―still-birth‖ or ―aborting‖ its creations. Most blatantly, the fertility of this ocean is asserted when it creates a giant, thirteen-foot baby (Solaris ―The Minor Apocrypha‖).

Just before the ocean creates this monstrous offspring, which is abject because of its combination of human and inhuman features, the ocean triggers the same abyssal motion which constantly seeks to consume Axel and his fellow explorers in Journey. As the explorer involved in this incident (pilot Berton) explains, the fog surrounding him as he descends over the ocean‘s surface seems to be the same sticky substance that the ocean is made out of. Berton then spots a

―kind of whirlpool... throwing up yellow foam,‖ on the surface of the ocean just as the wall of fog threatens to swallow him up in a swirling motion (Solaris ―The Minor Apocrypha‖).

Lem makes it clear, however, that it is the men who falsely feminize/ritually defile the ocean by using language which describes the abject as maternal. This is done in order to deflect

the lack in the men‘s own masculine identities and the inability of their signifiers to encapsulate the Real (Helford 170–71). In other words, by attempting to make the desire for contact with

Solaris his central conflict, Kris attempts to deflect his own horrifying split in being between his conscious and unconscious self. This split is unavoidable once it materializes in the form of his visitor Harey who (along with the other visitors) is a projection of unconscious desires. In general, Lem‘s patriarchal characters continually seek a foreign Other in order to forget the excruciating alienation of the symbolic order, or rather to annul this alienation by finding the

Other which will complete it. For Lem, the meaninglessness and unsignifiable nature of the archaic mother is already an inherent and central part of each man‘s identity. As Žižek puts it

―[c]ommunication with the Solaris-Thing thus fails not because Solaris is too alien, the harbinger of an Intellect infinitely surpassing our limited abilities … [but] because it brings us too close to what, in ourselves, must remain at a distance if we are to sustain the consistency of our symbolic universe – in its very Otherness.‖ (Žižek par. 15)

Lem‘s patriarchal characters reveal their fixation with the power of the phallus through their manic concern with the signification of this resistant Other. Their perceived mastery of the

Other, as well as of the self, is always overturned by the ocean‘s radically different nature. We see this occurring even in the very first chapter of the novel, in which Kris is launched into space by his mother ship The Prometheus. As Elyce Rae Helford has argued, this launch scene should be read as a moment of rebirth in which Kris is reborn out of the patriarchal mother ship and delivered into the new sphere dictated by the authority of the archaic womb (Helford 170). Once he has severed his connection to the Prometheus, Kris experiences a period of infancy in which he loses his false sense of self-mastery/bravado which defined him as a functioning subject in his past social order (Helford 170). Helford, who uses an older (and much-criticized) English-

language translation of this novel, confuses the language of this opening sequence for the language of sexual intercourse. She argues that Solaris is ―constructed as passive receptacle, the inactive and unresisting object of male desire‖ (170).

Here I would argue that Helford overestimates the amount of control Kris has during this rebirth. Once inside the capsule, Kelvin hangs suspended in air, unable to move in his ―metal shell,‖ as if trapped in the amniotic fluid of a womb. Like the child in the imaginary realm, Kris has virtually no control over his motor function. He is also left in darkness (which resembles the blackness associated with the feminine void) as the capsule is launched from the Prometheus. In this moment, the only illumination Kris will experience is the natural light of the stars. Because he is trapped in his ―cocoon of pneumatic cushions,‖ he can only look straight ahead. This prevents him from looking back at The Prometheus, and also obscures his view of the planet for a significant amount of time. It is integral to note that Kris‘ mastery of his body (sight, vision, temperature) is severely compromised even in this opening scene.

Kris‘ trajectory as he travels to Solaris also inverts itself (much like Vernian space) to undermine his control of his spatial orientation. Because of the indeterminacy of space, Kris reflects that as he enters Solaris‘ atmosphere he is no longer a long distance from the planet, but a long distance ―up‖ (meaning that he has entered the ―intangible boundary where distance becomes altitude‖) (Solaris ―Newcomer‖). This spatial disorientation constitutes a conflation of the registers of perception which result in a space-sickness reminiscent of Axel‘s experience of the lessons of the abyss. Kris‘ dizziness is heightened by the descending, spinning motion of his capsule.

While Helford is correct in asserting Kris‘ false sense of self mastery during this scene, his lack of control in this situation suggests that this false sense is rather a delusion (Helford

169). Ultimately, this episode serves to show a major disconnect between the body and the masculine ego, which incorrectly assumes a dominance over its body (and the world around it by association). Upon arriving at the station, Kris is pushed into further confusion and chaos while recovering from his descent.

Knowledge and Jouissance

The desire to apprehend the jouissance of this feminized Other is represented by the desire to signify Solaris empirically. However, attempts by Solaricists and Kelvin to discover the meaning of Solaris through technological study, mathematics, and even philosophy fail to produce any answers to the question: what is Solaris‘ existence? When attempting to decipher the meaning of the ocean‘s reactions to human/technological stimuli, it quickly becomes clear that the ocean never responds to the same stimuli twice. Further, the more experiments are conducted, the more indifferent the ocean becomes. The reader, as well as Kris, quickly learns that language (and its scientific equivalents) only points to evidence that Solaris is unknowable.

Kris‘ desire to apprehend Solaris‘ ocean, I argue, is more than a desire to signify sexual difference within the logic of the symbolic realm. His resulting attraction to the ocean is not simply constitutive of the life or death drives associated with sexual desire, but rather of a desire to merge with the infinite in acquiring the knowledge of the Other‘s jouissance. Lacan‘s depiction of this Other of the Body is intentionally vague. As I have mentioned, it is described only as a type of Being which has to do with life, death, and reproduction. However this is exactly the Other perceived by the Solaricists. Fundamentally enigmatic, the only reinforced ideas about the ocean are that it is a living form, that it undergoes ontological reproduction, and that it is constantly engaged in death by killing and rebirthing itself.

Unlike the Pre-Oedipal and Oedipal mother, whose two states depend on the traits of being or having the phallus in Lacan‘s theories, this archaic Other is her own point of reference.

This constitutes a threat to patriarchy‘s privileged position in the social order (gained through the subjection of the feminine) (Creed 44). Kris‘ continual attempts to find a signifier for Solaris in the symbolic realm (through the literature and history of Solaristics) continually fail because of this. His fear of the consuming power of the mother‘s preverbal (to him meaningless) language becomes augmented as a result. In Lem‘s fiction, this patriarchal fear is entertained, but only for the purpose of suppressing these apprehensions in favor of the possibility of contact with the

Other. Despite the excruciating psychological and sometimes physical pain of this process (also described in Lacan as a suffering/evil), Lem‘s characters are left desiring the infinite continuity of this Thing which would allow them to transcend their sexual difference and alienation.

Nightmares: The Unconscious Desire Makes Itself Known

Like Axel, Kris experiences night terrors in which he imagines contact with the abject

Other. Most importantly, these dreams constitute a wish-fulfillment on Kris‘ part, as he explicitly reiterates his desire to make contact with the ocean throughout the entire novel. Kris describes this dream as one in which he imagines being absorbed into ocean‘s womb:

The darkness filling the room was becoming populated... The walls were

disappearing. Something was towering over me, bigger and bigger, endless. I was

penetrated through and through, embraced without being touched... I focused my

whole attention, all the strength I had left, on expecting death throes. They didn‘t

come. I just kept shrinking, while the unseen sky, the unseen horizons, the

emptiness, devoid of shapes, clouds, stars, drawing back and swelling, was

making me its center, (Solaris ―Deliberations‖).

The horror of this dream is that Kris‘ ego must undergo the loss of self and signification in order to be incorporated by the archaic womb. Upon attempting to clench his fists in his face

(during the dream) Kris feels that he no longer has a face and that (in its stead) there is only a void: ―my fingers passed all the way through [my face]. I felt like shouting, howling...‖ This moment of horror when one finds only a void where there is supposed to be the image of the ego incites the greatest terror in the novel. As discussed earlier, the emptiness and infinity of this void are categories of abjection which are associated with the patriarchal construction of the abject/archaic mother.

Visitors: Mental Encystments of the Unconscious

Kris realizes he is a split subject when his unconscious desire is projected back to him by

Solaris in the form of Harey, his dead wife. While the symbolic realm of the father creates an image for Kris of himself as a unified whole or Gestalt, the supreme alienation felt in this order creates the sense that there is something missing (Helford 172). The connection between Kris‘ ego and his unconscious (made in flesh through the simulation of Harey) is made clear when he recalls his nightmares on Earth after the real Harey committed suicide. When he touches his arm in these dreams Kris feels an needle mark on his arm in the exact spot which Harey had injected herself with a lethal chemical. Kris also wakes up from these dreams in the same fetal position in which he found his wife‘s dead body. His resulting attraction to the Harey simulation is one in which he relives his desire and repulsion to his wife (the figure of his unconscious guilt). Kris finds himself wanting the new Harey (sexually and psychologically), despite the fact that she is

the embodiment of his guilt. He feels his body ―acknowledging her, wanting her, drawing [him] to her beyond reason, beyond argumentation and fear.‖

Lem describes the visitors as formations of the unconscious by asserting their reliance on their human hosts (the visitors cannot stand to be apart from the persons whose desires they express). Because of this reliance, Snaut deduces that these visitors are created from the men‘s

―mental encystments‖ which the ocean steals from them during sleep. The term ―mental encystments‖ is invented by Lem to invoke the presence of the crew‘s repressed memories and trauma. Also called ―psychic tumors,‖ Snaut describes these encystments as ―processes separated from the rest of the mind, enclosed, suppressed, [and] walled in.‖ These repressions are an inevitable facet of human existence that threatens to consume the individuated-signified masculine subject. Kris learns that the visitors‘ are made of neutrino structure which under a microscope are revealed to be nothing but a void. Their structure mimics (perhaps parodies) the patriarchal classification of the archaic womb as a site of consuming emptiness. Moreover, because they are ―made of nothing‖ these visitors cannot be killed. Though Kris attempts to kill

Harey several times, she always regenerates. The exception to this rule is of course Harey‘s suicide by the assistance of Snaut and Sartorius. But at this point, Harey has already separated from Kris as a host and begun to form her own identity. She attempts to stay away from him

(despite the anguish this causes her) in an attempt to form an identity outside of his memories

(Helford 174). It is interesting that these visitors are birthed from the minds of male subjects.

Here, Solaris expresses a fantasy that Creed identifies in Ridley Scott‘s film Alien– it negates sexual difference in the womb by allowing men to give birth (Creed 56).

The ocean first acts a mirror which projects the men‘s identities back to them (Helford

171). The necessity of a mirror to reflect humanity‘s identity back to itself is first discussed by

Snaut. He notes that the Solaricists‘ desire to contact the Other is really a desire to find another civilization which resembles our own rational-linguistic model of existence. Snaut understands that this mirror complex is a function of the visitors and that these visitors less alien than they seem: ―We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!‖(Solaris ―The Minor Apocrypha‖).

Snaut‘s visitor serves to reflect back to him his true image: an image which reflects his split in being and his desire for abject objects. Snaut never divulges the exact form of his visitor, but only frames it as a site of horror which threatens his sense of self propriety. Relating his unsignifiable visitor to a fetishist‘s object of desire, he maintains that – like the fetishist who is driven to possess ―a disgusting scrap of cloth which he adores‖ he cannot help but be attracted to his abject Other. Though this visitor is repulsive to Snaut, it is desirable because it signifies the potential for a unity of the subject. Because Snaut‘s language is frantic and affected when describing his visitor, we can surmise that his inability to articulate the description of the Other is a result of its unsignifiable nature: ―there are also other things… situations… the kind that no one has dared enact beyond their own thoughts, in a single moment of confusion,‖ (Solaris ―The

Minor Apocrypha‖).

Though Snaut and Kris eventually give up their scientific/medical experiments, Sartorius persists in this mad cycle until he develops the instrument which will aid Harey in her suicide.

Sartorius‘ visitor, then, reflects his fear that he is only a partially formed subject in this symbolic realm which defines him as an indefatigable/unrelenting scientist. The language describing this visitor is somewhat ambiguous, although the reader is given the impression that it takes the form of a small child or a dwarf. When standing outside of Sartorius‘ door, Kris hears childlike

footsteps and a ―burst of laughter from a child.‖ It is possible that this unidentified visitor represents the abjection of the subject who never fully severs his or her relation to the mother.

Gibarian‘s visitor, as Elyce Helford explains, is most likely a projection of his unconscious prejudices. Gibarian‘s inability to accept his own terrible racism/sexism then is most probably what drives him to commit suicide (Helford 175). Kris‘ first encounter with

Gibarian‘s visitor also reveals an ethnocentrism and sexism on his part (Helford 175). In this episode, Kris walks through the station‘s corridors which resemble a ―black chasm‖ reminiscent of the darkness of the abyss in Journey. As if emerging from the walls of the corridors,

Gibarian‘s visitor becomes visible. Embodied by the figure of an overweight black woman, this visitor incites terror and repulsion and even sexual desire in Kris. He compares her ―elephantine rump‖ to those ―Stone Age sculptures found in anthropological museums.‖ He then refers to her as a ―monstrous Aphrodite.‖ Helford likens Kris‘ experience with this visitor as the meeting of a patriarchal white male with its subjugated Other. She explains that Kris‘ description of this woman as a goddess figurine is a reference to the ―obese‖ and distortedly erotic fertility idols which were made to represent the female power of reproduction (Helford, 175).

Kris comes to terms with his own patriarchal desire for exploration and subjugation of the

Other when he denies the heroism of this final Solaris expedition. By admitting that ―the time of valiant planetary struggles, fearless expeditions, and terrible deaths… had come to an end long ago,‖ Kris is able to come to terms with the truth that his exploration has only been a futile attempt of a patriarchy subject to assert its masculinist signification of an Other.

Reality and Illusion: Deconstructing Boundaries

When Verne and Lem‘s characters are unable to find a signifier for the Others they encounter, they undergo anxiety, fear, horror, and a sense of derangement. This psychological derangement is ultimately the encounter with the irrational maternal semiotic which threatens the symbolic order. The interaction, the intimate proximity to, the unsignified Thing of the real thus leads to madness or the total loss of the ability to reason. As Žižek argues, this Thing in Solaris maybe isn‘t the Thing that will assuage our fear and horrors, but is perhaps a more terrible horror based on the presence of ―Something (the stain of the real)‖ instead of nothing (par. 2). We have already seen this trend in Axel‘s spatial sickness; in these episodes the dizzying chaos of the abyss compromises the senses. The fear of losing the ability to reason (going mad) is also a central concern in Solaris. We have already discusses Hatteras‘ derangement upon being unable to plant a flag (a signifier) on the terrain of the archaic mother, so let us further explore how this loss of reason affects Lem‘s characters.

Pathology is a central theme in Solaris as the threat of mental illness and suicide is woven through the novel. Before meeting Harey, Kris diagnoses the crew (including his former mentor

Gibarian) with suicidal/paranoid tendencies. Kris first feels the onset of paranoiac delusion himself when looking out at the ocean: ―the darkness was looking at me, [it was] amorphous, immense, eyeless, [and] devoid of limits,‖ (Solaris ―Solaricists). It is important to note that

Kris‘s scientific knowledge is psychologically based. His ability to separate the meaninglessness from the meaningful is a practiced skill in defining mental illness. But the meaninglessness of the maternal authority as represented by Solaris, he concludes, is not a delusion as defined by the symbolic order. Kris‘ initial paranoia, then, is not unfounded: the ocean is – the Solaracists discover – actually studying him and the visitors are real, tangible objects which attempt to

become subjects. What is so disruptive and maddening about this situation is that the symbolic realm (which functions to separate real and illusion/ proper and abject) is undermined by the semiotic of the archaic womb.

Contrary to what Žižek would suggest – in observing that Harey is a woman born of man through phallic signification who never becomes a subject – the true horror of Harey‘s presence is that she becomes an independent something out of nothing. Žižek nevertheless maintains that

Harey is a threat to patriarchy as she flaunts her lack (castration) as defined by Kris‘ phallic signification (par. 9). Žižek describes this threat as stemming from the threat of the woman who is ―denigrated, reduced to an inconsistent and insubstantial composite of semblances around a

Void‖ and that ―the more the woman is a firm, self-enclosed substance, the more she supports male identity,‖ (par. 9). Thus, the woman who disavows her lack is less of a threat than the castrated woman. While this may be true in other cultural texts and is an accurate account of

Kris‘ initial horror, it is clear that Harey‘s threat is also that she (and the archaic womb) represents both the emptiness and fullness of the Void. In other words, what is more threatening to patriarchy is exactly the presence of a womb which is not dependent upon the phallus for signification. As Creed reiterates, the mother of the dyadic and triadic relationship really functions as a dialectic to reaffirm the presence/power of a phallus.

It is Snaut who first attempts to warn Kris that the boundaries of the symbolic (which separate madness and rationality) are collapsed in the presence of the ocean. Snaut says that madness (as inscribed in the symbolic realm) would be ―a perfect solution‖ to the crew‘s problems. Snaut even goes so far as to state that if Gibarian was simply suffering from madness he wouldn‘t have taken his own life: ―If he had believed for a moment it was madness, he

wouldn‘t have done it,‖ ( Solaris ―The Minor Apocrypha‖). Madness, while an excruciating and severe experience, still preserves the boundaries between the abject and the proper.

This experience of psychological collapse in the face of the Other is also reinforced by

Berton‘s account of his experience with the ocean. In one of the numerous episodes in which

Kris retreats in his study to sift through previous research conducted on Solaris, he comes across an entry which documents Berton‘s search for a missing crew member. In this account, Kris learns of the loss of two scientists (Carruci and Fechner) in Solaris‘ atmosphere during the

Shennahan expedition. Carruci is eventually recovered, however, Berton must be sent out to find

Fechner. His account is documented in a history text as an amusing illustration of the different types of psychological delusions which can be caused by an exposure to Solaris‘ toxic gases.

Berton‘s psychological confusion, however, is not a simple experience of madness unique to one explorer: his visions are the precursors of the visitors which will plague the rest of the

Solaricists.

Berton also describes the ocean as a geological embodiment of the archaic mother we have seen in Verne‘s Journey. He maintains that the ocean threatens him through the formation of an deadly whirlpool on the surface of the ocean. While this whirlpool does not succeed in trapping Berton, the ocean does create a wall of fog around him. Due to pure luck, Berton finds an opening in this wall through which he narrowly escapes. At this point the ocean‘s fluid surface undergoes a substantial textural change in which it begins auto-metamorphic replication.

First, it constructs an entire garden out of its sticky clay. The ocean‘s creation of this garden, a common Earthly form, suggests that it is constructing these forms because it has swallowed

Fechner alive and is using his memories (Burton believes he sees Fechner‘s space suit in the ocean just before the replication process occurs). The gigantic infant that the ocean creates

directly afterwards suggests that the ocean is using Berton‘s mental encystments as he explains that he left a child back on Earth.

As I have mentioned, this baby is an abjection which challenges the boundary between the human and inhuman. But it is important to stress that Berton cannot identify with its image because it is not the easily signified phallic inscription of how an infant should move or look.

An infant‘s movements are chaotic, uncoordinated. They‘re not specific. Whereas

these movements, they were… Oh, I know! They were methodical. They took

place in sequence, in groups and series. As if someone were trying to find out

what the child was capable of doing with its arms, what it could do with its torso

and its mouth. The worst was the face, I guess because the face is the most

expressive part of the body. That face was like a face… No, I don‘t know how to

describe it. It was alive, yes, yet it wasn‘t human, (Solaris ―The Minor

Apocrypha‖).

Berton‘s account, however, is taken to be meaningless and psychologically deranged by

Earth‘s scientific leaders. Kris soon finds himself in a similar position: unable to apprehend the ocean and the visitors, he questions the stability of his own mental health. Kris begins to wonder if perhaps he is still on board the Prometheus imagining everything. But this utterance would be a relief; it would reaffirm the boundaries of normal and abject for Kris. Sartorius too is compared to the classic literary figure infamous for his inability to separate reality from the illusion: Don

Quixote.

This blending of reality and illusion is then reaffirmed in the episodes in which Kris recounts his inability to distinguish dreaming from consciousness. The acceptance of this indefinite situation is first felt in his interaction with the Harey simulation. Harey is first

mistaken to be a an element of a dream – a pure illusion. Upon waking up in his bed, Kris still thinks he is dreaming. He reflects on the vividness of his surroundings and that his ―dream‖ is in color. But as he notices Harey‘s reactions to his embraces and the objects in the room, he begins to doubt that he is asleep. Finally stubbing his toe, Kris realizes that not even physical pain can wake him up. He is horrified once he realizes the truth: Harey is made of the stuff of a waking dream.

The Real Illusion of Gender: Lem’s Return From the Stars

In Return From the Stars the blending of reality and illusion is taken to an extreme. This is echoed through both a literal play with simulations which mimic (and attempt to replace) reality, as well as the destabilization of gender identity as a fixed reality. Return is set in the modern future-present as an astronaut, Hal Bregg, comes back to Earth after a ten year voyage which, because of relativistic effects, is equivalent to the passing of one hundred and twenty seven years in Earth time. When he arrives, Hal discovers that a process called betrization has eliminated all aggressive tendencies in living beings (including but not limited to the ability to kill). The novel follows Hal as he adjusts to this new, technologically advanced and peaceful world in which the familiar is rendered uncanny.

While Lem clearly is critical of the pharmacological solution to the ―underlying problems of social evil‖ described in Return, the novel does function well as an experiment in gender construction (―Reflections‖ 21). It investigates the ways in which aggression has been used to construct masculine identity. In order to create a polemic discourse, Lem once more casts patriarchal, masculine characters into an alien terrain (the Earth made Unheimlich) which they

perceive as feminine. The masculine characters here are represented by Hal and the surviving members of this crew.

The Unisex: Gender in the Future

While I will show that the future civilization Hal comes back to is described by him as a monstrous-femininity, the actual reality of the matter may be that this society is increasingly unisex due to the effects of modern science on society. Lacan himself predicted that scientific modernity would become evident in social structures, ultimately leading to a ubiquity of phallic jouissance by allowing women to enter the work force and other social spheres previously dominated by masculine subjects (Barnard 48–49).

The men and women of Return’s futuristic society possess the same level of strength and overall potential for aggression. They are both castrated by the process of betrization in which the male libido is eliminated. Moreover, this society equalizes the female subject as the holder of her own subjectivity; when a woman marries she is not possessed by the man but instead stays with him (on average) for about four years. It is thus almost impossible to permanently possess a woman through the legal-symbolic contract of marriage. Secondly, births are heavily regulated by the government of this new humanity. As such, the procreation is not mandated by the interest in reproducing the new patriarchal subject (the son) but rather by an equal, sexless governmental authority. The unisexualization of jouissance by modern science is usually represented by the emergence of clothing which serves to hide sexual difference (Barnard 49). While Hal still sexualizes the clothing of this society (which is ornate and vibrant) as feminine, these clothes have a unisex effect as both men and women wear a very similar wardrobe. Lastly, the model of masculinity based on intellect and scientific discovery in both Verne and Lem‘s work is a

precursor to this new civilization. But this model of masculinity becomes radically different as it leads to the construction of a new unisex gender. Lem, in confusing the registers of masculinity and femininity, helps to deconstruct the idea that biology determines gender.

While Earth‘s new civilization is more unisex than feminine, Hal‘s experience of it reveals that he is fixated with depicting its radical alterity as a monstrous femininity. He describes the monstrous-feminine of this new civilization through three main categories of femininity: a tendency towards adornment/masquerade, gentleness/fragility, and creativity. He is disgusted by the new society‘s obsession with intricate outfits which are fantastic in appearance.

This clothing is shiny, metallic, inflated, and even feathered in some instances. Women also are painted strangely; their metallic make-up and the red paint in their nostrils incite aversion and fear in Hal. However, he soon adjusts to the women‘s choice to dress this way even as he suspects the men of the civilization of affectation (Return 3).

Gentleness (which is a result of betrization) creates a secure and somewhat utopian model of existence in this future Earth. All aggression leading to murder and even self-destruction is eliminated. As a side effect, betrization all but eliminates humanity‘s sexual libido and also, significantly, eliminates its drive for scientific discovery. Because of this (in combination with his patriarchal prejudice) Hal unfairly characterizes this civilization as pathologically effeminate.

This is the same characterization of femininity offered up as the reason why Graüben is omitted from the journey to the core of the Earth. As Hal remarks, there were no women allowed in space travel because it was feared that children would be born in the inhospitable environment of space. In both novels, subjects of patriarchal societies use the female body‘s reproductive functions as a prop to justify self-serving ends and the suppression of feminine agency. Hal mourns the loss of risk in this new civilization. For Lem, risk is an unavoidable element of

human existence which (paradoxically) helps to promote life. The tragedy of the future is that the drive to discover, to explore the far reaches of possibility, is eliminated with the loss of aggression. Return is then a novel about the programmed death of exploration.

As such, the age of exploration in which Hal formerly lived is a subject of repugnance and finally indifference for the new society. The mad patriarchal desire for knowledge/signification is undervalued because of this. Centuries of literature, scientific texts, histories, and Hal‘s own sacrifices to the exploratory drive, are delegitimized and discarded.

They are regarded as the primitive desires of the new society‘s long-extinct ancestors. The terrible sacrifice of human life for the irrational march of progress, to which Hal has lost many of his crewmates, is ridiculed and belittled – or worse, all but forgotten.

Lastly, Hal perceives the immense creativity of this society as a repulsive, feminine attribute related to the irrationality of the maternal semiotic. Because every real conflict and inconvenience is taken care of by technology, humanity now spends most of its time diverting itself with illusions. Hal‘s disapproval of these simulations is a consequence of his patriarchal upbringing. The existential crises he experiences upon meeting with these simulations (some of which are so simple as to mimic three dimensional cinema) stems from his fear of the undifferentiated (unsignified) maternal body as its own point of reference. Some of these illusions are so realistic that Hal loses his ability to distinguish it from his own reality. As such, they threaten to make the reality of his sacrifices in space – and the order of differentiation which they express – meaningless.

Hal‘s notion of his own masculinity as being a biological absolute is affirmed as an opposition to the new civilization because he cannot see them as unisex – for him they are only representations of the feminine sex. This becomes clear when Hal describes his hyperbolically

masculine body. His resemblance to the ―antediluvian‖ or primal man points to his belief in a masculinity which is founded on physical power/brawn. As such, Hal‘s body, which is excessively strong and chiseled due to the harsh conditions of space, is rendered clumsy and uncoordinated in this new Earth. It is not in any way able to assert power in the new Earth. Hal cannot even engage in his regular social greeting at first; during his first few days back, he must learn how to shake a person‘s hand without breaking his or her bones. Because of their excessive physical strength, Hal and his former crew member Olaf are berated for their resemblance to circus men – the fantastic strongmen who society can only gaze upon with amazed stupor.

However, Hal‘s masculinity is also described its relationship to signification. Continually seeking solace in mathematical and philosophical texts, Hal craves the former pleasure he experienced in the drive to apprehend and mark as significant the secrets of the universe.

While Hal marries a woman he first claims by force (he kidnaps her from her husband), in order to reassert his masculine presence in this world, he does not resort to barbarousness by learning to adjust to this betricized world. Though Olaf and the rest of the surviving crew members will go on a final mission into space which will probably lead to their horrific deaths,

Hal finds peace in this new civilization. His wife, Eri (the woman) begins to understand Hal‘s culture shock and willingly becomes his companion (as well a legal wife).

While Return may be so descriptive of patriarchal apprehensions as to be problematic in itself, Lem‘s breakdown of gender archetypes in this novel serves to redeem the novel. Hal eventually learns the horrible error of his actions against Eri at the novel‘s end. Further, he chooses to stay on Earth instead of going on a final suicide mission of space exploration with the remaining voyagers. He renounces this masculinist need to dominate foreign terrains in favor of enjoy the remaining years of his life. Hal serves as one of the few existentially sound characters

in Lem‘s canon. Finally able to see past his dominating (and oppressive) unconscious desires, he learns to live in a world devoid of risk and deal with the trauma he experienced in his first voyages to the stars.

Conclusion

I have attempted to avoid generalizing the depictions of patriarchy in these authors‘ diverse fictions. Though Verne and Lem‘s fictions both are bound to phallogocentric discourses which defines the maternal body (and by association the feminine/female subject) as abject or horrific, Verne struggles vehemently to push past sexual difference in his works. In attempting to do so he is more opposed to patriarchy than the average reader might assume. In depicting the failure of the masculine agency, as well as the paternal law, in the face of radical alterity, Verne effectively undermines patriarchy. Lem, whose literature is nurtured and influenced by Verne and a vast canon of Western fictions, further undermines the patriarchal sense of self mastery by using its own phallogocentric language against it. The focus of both of these authors‘ works eventually becomes less hysterical, and increasingly existential, allowing for a rich variety of narrative complications, insights, and memorable episodes. We are perhaps best able to grasp the originality and importance of these authors‘ fictions, and their inconsistent contestations of masculinist models of signifying agency by reading them for what they attempt to do, and not by that which they fail to achieve.

Works Cited

Barnard, Susan and Bruce Fink, eds. Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love,

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