Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  Sadly Rulfo is not well-known to a popular audience outside of Spanish-speaking countries, although authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges have credited him as one of the world’s greatest writers, and the international literary intelligentsia, as Susan Sontag has pointed out, read and praised his work.

  STANISŁAW LEM

  SOLARIS (1961)

  Lem’s powerfully intelligent and influential science-fiction story asks the fundamental question of whether we can begin to understand the mysteries of the universe without first coming to understand ourselves.

  Polish-born Lem (1921–2006) was an astonishingly prolific and varied writer, but there are good reasons why his novel Solaris, published in 1961, remains his best-known work. Always restlessly intelligent and inventive, as much a philosophical thinker as a writer of fiction, many of his stories are thought-provoking on an intellectual level. But this account of explorers from Earth attempting to make contact with the radically alien intelligence represented by the planet Solaris is more than just thought-provoking: it is poetic, moving, and liable to haunt your dreams.

  In the novel, human space explorers have been studying the baffling world of Solaris for decades. The whole planet is covered in a globe-spanning ocean that itself seems to be conscious and intelligent, although all attempts to make contact have failed. Indeed, the ocean-world appears indifferent to humanity, and the observing scientists have been reduced to recording and cataloging the complex phenomena that appear on the planet’s fluid surface. The mental health of the space station crew is suffering, and a psychologist named Kris Kelvin is dispatched from Earth. Kelvin’s wife has recently committed suicide, and when he arrives on the Solaris-orbiting space station he sees her again. Several of the crew report similar apparitions—physical manifestations of people they have lost. It seems that bombarding the planet with x-rays has caused it to respond by creating these eidolons: artificial people, gifted with minds and emotions read telepathically from the memories of the humans.

  Two well-regarded films have been made based on Solaris: the first by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, and the second by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. Both are haunting and beautiful works of visual art, but both focus much more on the relationships between the human characters than does the original novel. It’s not that Lem neglects that aspect of his story, it is just that he is much more interested in the sublime mystery of the planet. As Lem said in interview, having seen the first movie adaptation: “But the book was entitled Solaris and not Love in Outer Space!” In other words, Solaris is centrally about an encounter with an almost overwhelming radical alienness and otherness. Most science-fiction aliens look rather like humans or, if they differ from us physically, we are nonetheless able to communicate and interact with them. Science fiction is full of stories of human–alien trade, or wars, or intermarriage. Solaris is nothing like this.

  Early observers of Solaris assumed, the novel tells us, “that the thinking ocean of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization,” which had “long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.” But as the novel goes on, we realize that “the living ocean [is] active.”

  Not active according to human ideas, however—it did not build cities or bridges, nor did it manufacture flying machines. Nor was it concerned with the conquest of space. It was engaged in a never-ending process of transformation, an ontological auto-metamorphosis.

  That last word is key to the novel’s success as a work of fiction: Solaris as imagined keeps changing, redefining itself, and, therefore, redefining its human observers. This is why Lem imagines it in terms of an ocean: its consciousness is not fixed and benchmarked by static points of science, convention, or ideology, the way human minds are. It is in a process of continual flux. There is no world in the whole of science fiction like it.

  ANTHONY BURGESS

  A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962)

  A study of youth, violence, and free will, A Clockwork Orange creates a new language in order to build a world where children and adults are incomprehensible to each other.

  A Clockwork Orange begins with a question (“What’s it going to be then, eh?”), which will be repeated throughout the novel, and which will resonate differently each time it appears. It’s the next sentence, though, that plunges the reader into the book’s world: “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.…” More unfamiliar words are used: mesto, skorry, veshches, moloko, peet. In addition, the diction is also unusual: “the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry,” “and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten,” “admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints.”

  This is “nadsat,” an argot Anthony Burgess (1917–93) invented, mostly from anglicized Russian root words. The words create not only the voice of a person, they also evoke an entire world. It becomes clear that nadsat is a language used only by certain young people. Children who speak in nadsat make themselves all but incomprehensible to adults, who speak a standard version of English. With nadsat, Burgess makes the generation gap literal.

  In 1962, Anthony Burgess was already an established novelist, but A Clockwork Orange shot him to international fame, and particularly so after Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation was released in 1971. A prolific, polymathic writer, Burgess would go on to write a total of thirty-three novels, dozens of non-fiction books, plays, screenplays, autobiographies, translations, and musical compositions, making him one of the most prominent, celebrated, and controversial British writers of the later twentieth century.

  A Clockwork Orange is set in what was, when the book was published in 1962, the future, but the exact date isn’t clear, and the world is not significantly different from England in the 1960s. There are “worldcast” TV shows and other items that were more speculation than reality when the book was written, but the feeling of science fiction is mostly derived from the nadsat terms, which create an alienating effect easily as strong as warp drives and ray guns in conventional science fiction.

  There is also the ultraviolence. The word is Alex’s own for what he and his droogs get up to. They vandalize, they assault, they rape. In Kubrick’s film, the shock comes from just how much joy their sadism brings them, but in the novel the effect is somewhat different, and suggests much about this world. Alex brings girls home, plays Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for them, gives them drugs, and rapes them. There is a similar scene in the film, but in the book a key point is different: the girls “couldn’t have been more than ten [years old].” After the murder that will land him in jail, Alex reveals information previously unknown: he is only fifteen years old.

  The youth violence that the politicians and scientists try to solve (which renders Alex into the titular “clockwork orange,” incapable of committing any sort of aggression without being crippled by pain and nausea) is not small stuff. Alex is a monster, living a monstrous life, and such a life does not seem uncommon in this world. Whether Alex ought to be programmed against violence or left to his own free will is one of the questions the novel raises.

  Alex becomes a political symbol for a group opposed to the government’s plans for controlling violence. The government, too, wants to use him. Neither side consider him as a person, he is merely a symbol to be broadcast for political gain: a clockwork orange of another sort.

  A Clockwork Orange is often described as depicting a dystopia, but that’s not quite right. In its characters’ eyes, it is a world heading that way. To the government and many citizens, the out-of-control children are leading the country toward chaos; to radicals, the government is trying to destroy free will and individuality. All we can know is that the world becomes a different one after the events of the story; in one of the first sentences of the book, Alex complains about “things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to for
get.” He has not forgotten, nor could he, and so he helps us remember a world we never experienced.

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  PALE FIRE (1962)

  “Nabokov’s most perfect novel” and a postmodern masterpiece, Pale Fire presents a wildly original narrative structure in the form of a 999-line poem, with an extensive, and very subjective, commentary that reveals the politics and petty jealousies of academia.

  What can be said about Pale Fire to someone coming to it for the first time—someone who doesn’t have all day, much less the lifetimes needed to dig down to all its different levels? To start with, it’s a very fancy and very funny fairy tale, told partly by an imaginary poet and partly by an imaginary critic, who is supposedly explaining the imaginary poet’s poem, but is mostly trying to shape the poem, which is a combination of fantasy and autobiography, into a reflection of his own imagination.

  Pale Fire is full of tricks and mirrors and false bottoms, and also people you’d never find in your usual wonderland. Look! There’s Dr. Samuel Johnson! He’s dressed as a suburban English professor, and pontificates in an upstate college town instead of eighteenth-century London. And then there’s a trained assassin, sent from pre-Soviet Russia to kill an exiled king. When they’re not turning on one another, people are turning into one another by the strange lights of Pale Fire—reformed and transformed, but never so you don’t recognize them. There’s a home-run hitter named Chapman (in reference to the Chapman of Keats’s poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” an old-time, big-league translator of Homer) who becomes a character in the poem, where his achievements are published in a newspaper and nailed to a door:

  … from the local Star

  A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4

  On Chapman’s Homer…

  Look again at that king killer come from far away; he’s reborn as a garden-variety lunatic, just escaped from the local asylum. And a closer look at that exiled monarch from a kingdom called Zembla (somewhere between Iceland and the Garden of Eden) shows a pedantic, semi-certifiably psychotic, perennially “visiting” professor, a bizarrely and bravely unapologetic vegetarian, homosexual émigré, living in the middle of the last century, before those things were accepted.

  By all accounts, the world of Pale Fire is hilarious. The poem “Pale Fire,” written by the imaginary poet, is a pretty good poem, although the imaginary poet (his name is Shade) would be the first to tell you it’s not what a lot of people would call great the way Paradise Lost is great: “Pale Fire” (and Pale Fire, for that matter) won’t explain the mysteries of the deep to you. It won’t serve up Eternity, much less promise eternal life. (That’s partly why the critic—his name is Kinbote—tries to make the poem into something it isn’t: an epic of his sorely missed, wholly imaginary Zembla, stocked with winter palaces and seaside dachas, 24/7 pomp and circumstance, and teams of costumed young athletes. This is Kinbote’s own, his native land, all the more beloved for living only in his mind.)

  About as far from Zembla or any “kingdom by the sea” as anything could be, the poem itself makes no promise of happiness. “Pale Fire” makes no promise to enlighten or assure, or put an end to all that ails. The poet is very imaginative—he can turn a phrase so that the most ordinary sight or sound is magically transformed into a thing of beauty and a joy, albeit not forever. This lack of “forever” is the problem in a nutshell: it’s the pain that no amount of pretending can keep out of any wonderland:

  And suddenly a festive blaze was flung

  Across five cedars, snowpatches showed,

  And a patrol car on our bumpy road

  Came to a crunching stop…

  That festive blaze—police lights—is a cool transformation, but no amount of poetic dancing can keep that patrol car from its appointed round: It’s come to tell the poet and his wife that their daughter has taken her own life. The pain at the heart of Pale Fire—the loss of the will to live, the loss of that which you love—never goes away. And the greatness of Nabokov’s greatest pretending is to never pretend that it can.

  PIERRE BOULLE

  PLANET OF THE APES (1963)

  At once a biting satire and unsettling critique of modern civilization and arrogance, the story of a planet ruled by primates has become one of the most well-known tales of the twentieth century.

  Ulysse Mérou, the central character in Pierre Boulle’s 1963 satirical novel, La Planète des Singes, is a journalist who shares his name with the hero of Homer’s Odyssey (c.725–675 BCE, here) Like his Greek namesake, he is a traveler—in his case journeying through deep space in the year 2500 to a planet orbiting the star Betelgeuse—and, like him, he is unexpectedly taken prisoner by strange creatures. He shows a similar degree of cunning in first winning the trust of his captors and then contriving his escape. But there the similarity with the Odyssey ends. While Homer concentrates on the journey that finally takes his hero home, Boulle’s focus is on the world in which Ulysse and his companions find themselves.

  Although Boulle puts the distance they travel at three hundred light years—less than half the actual distance to Betelgeuse—the fact that their spaceship almost reaches the speed of light means that, because of the effects of relativity, the journey takes them only two years. They land on a planet that is markedly like the one they left behind, and are so struck by the immediate similarities that they call it Soror, the Latin word for sister. However, they discover that humans in this new world have degenerated into the condition of wild animals, and apes have taken their place as the dominant species.

  Even before they land, the explorers’ instruments tell them that the atmosphere, like that of Earth, contains oxygen and nitrogen; although Boulle’s Betelgeuse is three or four hundred times as big as the sun, the distance of the planet’s orbit means that levels of radiation are also comparable. The countryside spread out below as their spaceship approaches confirms these early impressions. First, they see continents surrounded by a blue ocean. As they get nearer, there are towns with houses and tree-lined streets with cars, and a thick russet-colored forest reminiscent of Earth’s equatorial jungles:

  There was no doubt that we were on a twin-planet of our Earth. Life existed. The vegetable realm was in fact particularly vigorous. Some of these trees must have been over a hundred and fifty feet tall. The animal kingdom was not slow to manifest itself to us in the form of some big black birds, hovering in the sky like vultures, and other smaller ones, rather like parakeets, that chased one another chirping shrilly.

  However, it gradually becomes clear that the men and women who emerge, naked, from the jungle and finally take them prisoner have neither speech nor civilization. When Ulysse and his companions, along with their captors, are chased through the jungle in a terrifying hunt in which many of the humans are killed, he realizes to his horror that humans and apes have changed places.

  Even in the towns to which he is eventually taken by his ape captors—initially led on a chain like a pet—occasional differences from life on Earth (such as the aerial crossing places in the streets where pedestrians simply swing above the traffic) serve only to highlight the overall similarity between Soror and his home.

  The gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees who hold Ulysse captive believe that man has never evolved beyond his savage condition, because of the physical disadvantage of having only two hands, rather than the four an ape possesses. It is only later that highly controversial research comes to light, revealing that the apes actually achieved dominance by copying the achievements of a scientifically advanced but idle and feckless race of men.

  There are no wars, no armies, and no nations on Soror, which is ruled by a council of ministers under the leadership of a triumvirate consisting of one gorilla, one orangutan, and one chimpanzee. There is also a tri-cameral parliament representing the three different species.

  Long ago, the gorillas used to reign by sheer physical force, but now, at least in theory, all the different species have equal rights. In practice, despite the general i
gnorance of the gorillas, they remain the most powerful class, because of the cunning ways in which they manipulate the others. They also work as guards or law-enforcement, and in other roles that require physical strength, and retain a passion for hunts like the one in which Ulysse is captured and scores of other humans are killed, including one of his companions.

  The orangutans—less numerous than either gorillas or chimpanzees—form a class of scientists and scholars, although Ulysse dismisses them as “official science,” unoriginal, opposed to any innovation, and content to use their highly retentive memories to learn vast amounts of information from books.

  The true intellectuals are the chimpanzees, who are imbued with a powerful spirit of research, and who have been responsible for most of Soror’s great discoveries. The apes have electricity, industries, motorcars, and airplanes, but Ulysse notes that, technologically, they still lag behind the civilization he left behind.

  However, they have classical, impressionist, and abstract artists, sports such as soccer and boxing, and zoos filled with various species of animals, including men, in cages. Apart from hunting, killing, and imprisoning men, the apes use them for gruesome medical experiments and generally treat them with cruelty and contempt. Explaining his origins to a scientific congress on Soror, Ulysse declares: