In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

13 Churning Up the Depths Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and “Oceanic” melody Jue The first time I watched the BBC’s Blue Planet documentary series, I was fascinated by deep-sea footage of a dark, calm pool of water whose surface was carpeted by a bed of mussels. How could there be a second surface of water —underwater? David Attenborough’s voice patiently explained that this was in fact a deepwater brine lake: “During the Jurassic period, the water here was shallow and became cut off from the ocean. The area soon dried out, leaving a thick layer of salt and other minerals up to 8 km thick. When the ocean water returned after the region rifted apart, the super-saline layer at the bottom of the Gulf became an underwater lake. Now brine, which is continually released from a rift in the ocean floor, feeds the lake.”1 Seeing this underwater lake, I began to rethink my spatial intuition. The ocean, for us, is commonly conceptualized as a Cartesian volume that can be gridded and measured, with a surface only at the top.2 This dominant metaphorical sense of “depth” as the below and “surface” on top is based on the normal position of a human observer. By surprising us with a counterexample of a unique “surface” within the depths, Blue Planet reveals both the pervasiveness of our land-based perspective of surface and depth and how it colors the terrestrial metaphors we live by. We expect a surface on top and depth underneath in both reality and in figurative language, but there may be other possible senses of these terms.3 The underwater lake example suggests a stigmatism, or misalignment of the figurative and the literal figures, which produces a kind of cognitive estrangement similar to what we experience in science fiction about oceans and aquatic beings. This chapter discusses how the cognitively estranged environments of SF challenge our terrestrial senses of surface and depth. As case studies, I focus on two texts: Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s seminal 1961 novel Solaris and Greg 227 C hu rni ng u p the De p t hs| Ju e Egan’s novella “Oceanic.” Solaris imagines a sentient ocean and its responses to scientific investigation, while “Oceanic” imagines smaller-scale ocean microbes whose chemical excretions produce religious feeling. In both texts, oceans disrupt human practices of symptomatic reading and valuation of depth. Gender and sexuality also play key roles, for in both texts a feminized “nature” no longer accommodates the kind of scientific penetration that would accompany a deep reading. Instead the feminine—as a character, and the element of water—disorients male protagonists in both texts, such that they rethink their relation to transcendental or “deep” knowledge and epistemological limits. In the following analysis, I hope to churn up the “clean” model of surface versus depth through science fictional estrangements, using Solaris as a diagnosis of habitual figurations of depth, and “Oceanic” as the story that imagines how the mutual relations of human and nonhuman suggest alternative relations to depth and interpretive practices. Rather than considering depth as a single definable concept, both stories introduce other possibilities through the participation of nonhumans to suggest an ecological and participatory sense of figurative meaning. solaris Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961) dramatizes scientific attempts to penetrate and understand the ocean-planet Solaris according to the classic model of surface/ depth, provoking a crisis that is jointly scientific, masculine, colonial, and terrestrial . The novel begins with psychologist Kris Kelvin, an expert on “Solaris studies,” moving from a transport ship to the space station above Solaris in a kind of embryonic pod. The space station, hovering from an Archimedean standpoint above the planet, would seem to offer the scientists an ideally objective location from which to study Solaris. Yet Solaris has long been suspected of sentience on a planet-wide scale: it may be altering its own orbit in space, and it routinely throws up radiant, geometrically complex structures from its surface. In one early description, Kelvin calls the Solaris ocean “a monstrous entity endowed with reason, a protoplasmic ocean-brain enveloping the entire planet and idling its time away in extravagant theoretical cogitation about the nature of the universe. Our instruments had intercepted minute random fragments of a prodigious and everlasting monologue unfolding in the depths of this colossal brain, which was inevitably beyond our understanding.”4 Here, Kelvin draws an analogy between psychological and oceanic “depths,” reading the ocean planet...

Share