LCT JOURNAL 2020
The Censored Voice: Redefining Agency in Stanislaw Lem’s The Mask Ellen Grace Parsons
I
n his paper “Nation-Building as a Communist Rational Planning Strategy,” sociologist Marian Kempny describes the methodology of identity control by the ruling party in Communist Poland. “The official propaganda forged the reality of one, indivisible nation and promulgated the idea of the superiority of a single-nation state over a multi-national one” (Kempny 350). Kempy also emphasizes the importance of storytelling in nation-building. He notes that narrations of individual experience “provide versions of reality that contribute to the flow of meaning which rests at the heart of any society” and “allow the members of a particular community to challenge the metanarratives of ‘great’ national tradition” (Kempny 360-361). Stanislaw Lem began his career as a writer of science fiction in Soviet-occupied Poland, a time and place where selfexpression was hindered by the regime’s censorship of all published materials. This control centered curation of Lem’s Poland led to a difficult habitat for identity building. Scholars wonder what drew Lem to science fiction– the rise of Science fiction is often attributed to countries engaged in imperialist projects and fast technological advancement, which lead to the necessity of its citizens imagining what this industrialized future might bring. While the Soviet Union as a whole may have fit into this theory, Poland did not. The experience of the average polish citizen did not demonstrate the ideal post-war industrialized life. Scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronan in his paper “Lem, Central Europe, and the Genre of Technological Empire” poses this question: “ What could have inspired a man living in a famous medieval city, forbidden to write about the leading edge of science at the time by the forced mythology of Soviet science, to write the most influential science fiction to come out of non-techno-imperial culture?” (144). He argues that the purpose of Lem’s science fiction was “to mediate Polish national culture from an insular national role to that of a global culture” (Csicsery-Ronay 144). Lem was drawn to science fiction because it was a place for world building – a place to speak what was unspeakable, so that he could begin to create his own narratives. Throughout his career, Stanislaw Lem wrote countless novels, short stories, and in the latter part of his lifetime, focused on essays and non-fiction. I’ve focused here on his short story The Mask, simply because it demonstrates the necessity of agency in identity building – the narrative that the Polish people were attempting to grasp. I posit that The Mask aims to prove that being able to
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