Trouble in Paradise: The Problem of Violence in Stanislaw Lem's, Eden (1958)

 

Among other things, Stanislaw Lem’s intriguing novel, Eden (1958), is about the inherent difficulty of communicating with a non-human civilization. A six-member crew crashes on a bizarre alien planet. Before the astronauts have even begun trying to understand the inhabitants of Eden, they almost immediately resort to the one form of communication that requires no translation or explanation: the universal Rosetta Stone … violence.

The explorers’ first encounters with the planet are characterized by destruction. The spacecraft itself crashes. The crew’s almost Pavlovian response to their unfamiliar environment is not curiosity but fear, suspicion and, quickly after that, force.

Their first move is to arm themselves. Then, when inevitably confronted by that which they cannot understand – and which they cannot fit neatly into human conceptual constructs – their first instinct is to attack. Violence becomes, in effect, the first language on Eden. The men have no idea what the strange creatures, machines and structures around them mean. What they do know is how to shoot at anything, hostile or not, that frightens them.

For me, this is one of the truly significant elements in the novel: the violence they subsequently discover on the planet is not simply an alien aberration. As the crew slowly comes to a tentative and fragmentary understanding of Eden’s culture, they encounter a world in which violence has become embedded in the planet’s very social organization itself. The inhabitants are subjugated by forces they do not understand and apparently cannot resist. (As an example, the prisons on Eden – if that is what they actually are – have no guards and the prisoners themselves manifest no desire to escape). 

In Edenic society mechanisms have developed for modifying, controlling and even concealing reality. The inhabitants appear trapped withing a system whose purpose remains inaccessible and largely inexplicable to them.

The parallel (indeed the irony) here is disturbing. Consider that the humans respond to an incomprehensible world by imposing force upon it. At the same time, the inhabitants of Eden live within a world in which violence has already become institutionalized into an overarching system … a way of life.

It’s worth noting as well that the violence on Eden is both physical and the result of the use/abuse of information technology. As “dated” as some of the technology in the novel is, Lem was ahead of his time on that one. Perhaps the subject for another post?

 At one point, the ship’s doctor declares … “we are barbarians.” At another, he asks, “must it always be this way?” The latter is one of the novels most disquieting questions. Lem refuses to answer by providing a facile distinction between civilized humans and barbaric aliens. On the one hand, the crew is genuinely horrified by what it discovers about Eden. On the other, their own behavior repeatedly reproduces a similar pattern – encounter something that can’t be easily understood or classified, assume danger, then respond with violence.

This is one of the reasons that Eden is so much more than just another “first contact” story. The crux is not simply that humans cannot understand the aliens they encounter. Rather, it’s that faced with that which they cannot understand, they fall back on behaviors that render understanding all but impossible.

The violence on Eden may indeed belong to an alien society, but the impulse toward violence belongs to the visitors to that planet as well. The dark implication of this novel may be that violence does not necessarily arise from knowing that another being or species is hostile. It may not even arise from misunderstanding. A much more unsettling possibility is that violence is in fact part of what we are … and part of the universe itself.