Chaosmos

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I argue that in the years 1960‒1980—roughly from Solaris (1961), through His Master's Voice (1968), to Golem XIV (1981)—Stanisław Lem carried out an anthropological experiment in which his protagonists were confronted with unknowable phenomena. The fullest expression of this experiment is the novel Solaris, in which a new function of literature—the universalization of uncertainty—is unveiled. This feature links Lem's novel with the works of other Polish writers, such as Witold Gombrowicz, Tadeusz Różewicz, Andrzej Czycz, Teodor Parnicki, and Edward Stachura. Some of their works from the 1960s and 1970s can be considered representative of the post-avant-garde in Polish prose; these works question key social beliefs (especially regarding the efficacy of cognition, the adequacy of language, and the stability of the human subject), but instead of proposing a new order, their authors indicate the need for accepting that human existence is not grounded in a higher order.