Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem

Beloved and befuddling, Stanisław Lem is a master of obfuscation. Fragments of biography are carefully concealed across an oeuvre that includes novels, plays, reviews of books (both real and imagined), and public pronouncements. But those fragments are disguised; they appear backwards in a mirror; they find expression through alien worlds and futurological experimentation. Many of us long-time fans of Lem read his works and forgot, overlooked, or ignored the clues he left us that indicated the extent to which his past experiences haunted his present and poisoned his imagined futures. Now, in Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem, Agnieszka Gajewska shines a powerful light on those fragments, enabling not only an archaeology of what she finds, but also an interpretation of the excavations.Pulling together information from a wide range of sources and from her own encyclopedic knowledge of Lem's works, Gajewska shows Lem's personal experience as refracted through his creative output. Throughout his life, Lem endeavored to obscure the personal in his writing, and often deliberately prevaricated. At the heart of Gajewska's investigation is Lem's Jewishness, a fact central to his life experiences but which he himself took pains to elide and keep from public scrutiny for a variety of reasons—not least of which was the postwar climate in communist Poland. “Disclosure of identity means death; it destroys the protagonist's psychological immunity, leading to paranoia and self-destruction,” she notes, an observation that applies equally well to Lem and to many of his characters (p. 123).Gajewska explores his history through the lens of his works, focusing on subtle points that even a lifelong Lem-lover might have missed. “The author of His Master's Voice thus pointed to two cycles of reception of his works—the first circle consisted of people with similar life experiences, understanding his allusions to the past and the present despite the science fiction setting; the other were readers who did not notice the historical context, fascinated by the fantastical convention, focused on intertextual and genre games,” she writes (p. 133). Gajewska's book is well positioned to offer something new and engaging to both groups of Lem's readers, as well as to scholars of the Holocaust more generally.Her purpose, she tells us, is not “to reconstruct historical and biographical events,” nor to “seek a coherent interpretation frame that would bind together this vast collection of prose” (p. 23). Instead, Gajewska offers us a productive use of the fragments, “to present narrative loops, point out seemingly non-functional anecdotes, broken threads and abandoned concepts” (p. 23). She seeks her answers from the dark interstices of Lem's works, “in masks, mediation, narrative shadows—hiding behind ostensibly indirect speech, but also behind an omniscient narrator, suspending fictional worlds in space and alternative worlds, apocryphalism and false clues. . . . [. . .] seeing in them traces of testimony” (p. 23). For example, she notes that the character Rappaport's wartime experiences, as related in Highcastle, offer “probably the most complete testimony about the events of the occupation to be found in Lem's entire oeuvre,” but that that testimony is shown doubly fragmented, told not directly by Rappaport himself but filtered through Hogarth—Lem did not give direct voice even to the experiences of a fictional character. She notes that such narrative distancing may have been both a security measure (e.g., Lem shifted the dates of some of the incidents he related to avoid any association with NKVD crimes) and what Gajewska calls Rappaport's “contaminated memory” (p. 83). Such deep readings are built on her thoroughgoing knowledge of both Lem's works and Polish history and provide even a layperson with sharp insight into not only Lem's works, but also into other authors working through trauma in their writing.Across Lem's works, Gajewska also trains her critical eye on important themes, such as the father figure, doubling, blind chance, memory, and the refugee, building on scholarship of trauma, witnessing, and memory from such eminent figures as Lawrence Langer. Memory in Lem may be threatening, which is most common, and which must lead to memory's denial or burial, and then to madness, or it may lead to some sort of reconciliation; Solaris offers examples of a variety of responses to memory and trauma. Memory concerns not only one's own suffering but also the suffering of others, and “encounters with the horror and suffering of others may lead to the loss of integrality, madness and suicide attempts” (p. 124). For survivors of the Holocaust, the act of witnessing is both pain and power, reliving the trauma even as they fill the void left by the Nazi erasure of millions of lives. Lem's works, now with Gajewska's illumination, may be read as part of the writing added to the page erased by the Nazis.“The science fiction setting and ambiguous allusions to historical events in Lem's genre prose can be read as a residue of personal, generational and family traumas, stored in unusual spaces reminiscent of crusted lava, alienated and lonely, hidden on foreign planets and in windowless rooms,” Gajewska summarizes in her conclusion (p. 157). She recognizes her own position of privilege in her ability to look back safely on Lem's experiences, and also wrestles with whether she is morally permitted to “reveal the story of his life during the occupation” (p. 160). In the end, she decides that Lem himself gave tacit permission by speaking up more about his wartime life in his last years. Although Holocaust and the Stars is a slim volume, it offers a powerful telescope through which to view Lem's cosmos. His family history, lost relatives, hiding during the occupation, surviving the war and then surviving its aftermath of persecution, continuing to bury his identity for most of his professional life—Gajewska traces these stars to form a constellation which guides us through the master's works, finally arriving on his home planet, one far distant from our own and yet not inhospitable, one filled with monstrous mimoids, suggesting the contours of memory and trauma.