In Space, No One Can Hear You Hope
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In his book, Hope Without Optimism, Terry Eagleton works to clarify the difference, philosophically, historically, between the two terms. It is, he affirms, the difference between action and stasis, between mission and sentiment. ‘Optimism,’ he writes, ‘as a general outlook is self-sustaining. If it is hard to argue against, it is because it is a primordial stance toward the world, like cynicism or credulity, which lights up the facts from its own peculiar angle and is thus resistant to being refuted by them.’ Optimism arrives pre-determined, just like pessimism. It requires no effort, no risk; it simply is. Hope, on the other hand, must be reached for. It is in tomorrow and the next day, ‘a confidence that one’s project will prevail’. Hope remains aware of circumstance and pain, and despair. In fact, it needs these things to exist, since to hope is to carry the image of something better. ‘A habitually hopeful individual is not in the first place one who enjoys certain sensations, but one who is predisposed to act and respond affirmatively with regard to the future. To this extent, he or she resembles the optimist; but to practise the virtue of hope is not necessarily to assume with the optimist that things will work out well.’
On the face of it Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker-prize winning novel, is held together primarily by hope. Set aboard the International Space Station, we are given privileged access to the interior lives and perspectives of six astro- and cosmonauts. And, as the title suggests, the novel spends its time making sixteen orbits of the Earth. During that time, no particular story develops, we learn some background detail about the crew and, most importantly, we observe our planet through their eyes. In sixteen orbits and 136 pages of watercolour prose, our whole idea of earth is supposed to shift. We are asked to become simple receptacles, filled to the brim with cosmic awe: ‘The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife.’
To take critics’ word for it, Orbital is nothing but hope. It is, according to Alexandra Harris in The Guardian, ‘a hopeful book and it studies people who act on their hope. It’s an Anthropocene book resistant to doom.’ James Wood deemed it ‘the strangest and most magical of projects’. Or in Edmund de Waal’s words as the Booker Prize’s Chair of Judges: ‘All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.’
But does it hope? To be ‘resistant to doom,’ as Harris suggests, is what you might also call utopia – a non-place, a perfect status-quo within which hope is unnecessary, and therefore, doesn’t exist. ‘Images of utopia,’ Eagleton writes, ‘are always in danger of confiscating the energies that might otherwise be invested in its construction.’ But Harris is backed up in this assessment by the novel itself (although ‘Anthropocene book’ is technically any book currently being released). True, there are places where Harvey points to existential threat, or fear, or the looming eclipse of environmental collapse. But besides the fact that they don’t lead anywhere, can any sense of unease survive among such endless sentimentalism? ‘Before [Pietro] left Earth his teenage daughter had asked him: do you think progress is beautiful? Yes, yes, he’d said, not having to think. So beautiful, my God.’ There are almost too many examples of this kind to offer.
While reading Orbital for the first time, another book gradually crept to my mind. On rare occasions, Harvey seemed to invoke it directly, on the first page in fact. ‘Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.’ Reading further on, I realised where my attention was being pulled. It was to another novel, one also nominated for a Booker, though in this case it was the International Prize – the younger, often cooler cousin. Desperate for a little shade aboard the ISS, I had unintentionally called in the Six-Thousand Ship: plastic nightmare of a vessel and setting for Olga Ravn’s novel The Employees.
Ostensibly, the two novels have a lot in common. Both are bordering on novella and move without call to a formal plot – Harvey arguably goes without sequence entirely, while Ravn offers a disorganised post production – both detail the effects of human removal from planet Earth. Both are acclaimed literary novels set in space, written by women. Both, as I mentioned, were picked out by Booker Prize judges in different years. And it is in this apparent reflection, that you can see what a real lack of hope looks like. It’s why Orbital already feels dated, while The Employees arrives as if from its own future of the 22nd century.
You can read in Orbital that billionaires pay for space travel, and human greed is destroying the planet. And then you can carry on with your day.
The Employees puts forward a future in which capitalism is now a space-faring machine, and every human and humanoid aboard the Six-Thousand Ship – so distant from Earth that living memory of it has died out – is subject to workflow and performance optimisation. The book itself is a company report, ‘collected over a period of 18 months, during which time the committee interviewed the employees with a view to gaining insight into how they related to the objects and the rooms in which they were placed’. These ‘objects’, discovered and carried back from the planet New Discovery, are interpreted differently by each member of the crew. Since production has dictated every facet of their lives so far, the arrival of these objects, these alien conduits, instigates a ship-wide endemic of reflection. Employees relay feelings of promiscuity, loss, fear, dread, yearning, love. ‘We want to escape from here, but not to escape each other, so this place is our only option. […] I exist in this new combination of melancholy and joy, and this double emotion has become my companion.’ Memories of Earth and family, whether artificial or otherwise, disrupt the machinery of labour. Because of this, the committee recommend termination of the Six Thousand Ship and its inhabitants. The disruption, once begun, cannot be reversed. It is a deeply claustrophobic, bleak novel delivered in a clutter of chapters. On a literal level, it makes space travel, the great green light across the lake of late capitalism, terrifying. Yes, we have breached the limits of our own galaxy, but nothing has been answered, and production must go on. But part of that terror Ravn builds is what she leaves unsaid. She never offers us a blueprint of the Six-Thousand Ship, or the names of its crew, and the language is often so enigmatic as to deny fixture. ‘I’m tormented by dreams of seed grain growing out of my skin,’ begins one of the employee statements:
‘I think of the clear sky above the train station near my building. My thoughts can go back momentarily to the stairway in my building and the smell it had. […] When can it be said that I no longer exist? For example, does my smell precede me, and do I touch objects with my smell? I dream about the footprints of birds in the snow, the footprints rise up towards me, and I feel, even when I’m awake, as though I’m constantly being touched by hair.’
And yet at the same time, the terror is the point – everything about The Employees comes to us as a lived experience of hope. The writing, the trust that its readership desires difficulty, the space given to imagine something new. ‘True hope is needed most when the situation is at its starkest,’ Eagleton tells us, ‘a state of extremity that optimism is generally loath to acknowledge. One would prefer not to have hope, since the need to do so is a sign that the unpalatable has already happened.’
It is this willingness to admit despair, and to act anyway, that gives The Employees the direction that Orbital lacks. To return to de Waal’s quote regarding the Booker’s choice, ‘All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore.’ The Employees does not find answers because Ravn poses the uncomfortable and uncanny, and in doing so, makes no questions explicit. Orbital, on the other hand, asks so many literal questions that one loses track. And yet the reason it finds no answers is because it does not honestly ask anything of the reader.
Because it never demands of us, it also never commits to anything. This is why it feels retrograde, expressing broad liberal slogans for readers to digest, and in the process feel as if they participated in political action. You can read in Orbital that billionaires pay for space travel, and human greed is destroying the planet, and politicians are selfish. You can have these things spelled out for you. And then you can carry on with your day, having both read an award-winning literary novel, and acknowledged the existence of capitalist overreach.
Both de Waal and Harvey herself have made comments concerning Orbital’s lack of political commentary. This, however, isn’t exactly true. The commentary is just without any direction. Much of the marketing surrounding Orbital has been about its ‘new perspective’ on Earth and its human element, as if because the novel is set above the planet, something more than a visual shift necessarily takes place. From the ISS’s vantage, the consequences of the age become too small to see. Politics, lower or upper case, zoom out into a brief novelty. Harvey writes exactly this:
‘They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You will see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war.’
Then, on the following page:
‘Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? […] Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?’
Then, on the following page again:
‘One day they look at the earth and they see the truth. If only politics really were a pantomime. If politics were just a farcical, inane, at times insane entertainment provided by characters who for the most part have got where they are, not by being in any way revolutionary or percipient or wise in their views, but by being louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously wanting of the play of power than those around them, if that were the beginning and end of the story it would not be so bad. Instead, they come to see it’s not a pantomime, or it’s not just that.’
What are we to do with this, exactly? Given the premise of Orbital as a type of nature prose poem, it’s easy to summon the argument of art for art’s sake. Yet here we have the author standing directly in front of the story and saying: what gives? Can’t we just all be good? You can almost hear John and Yoko at their piano. Rather than threading any of this into narrative, we simply receive these half-hearted gestures towards the sorry state of the world.
How God is approached in Orbital is perhaps the best way to look at its directionless optimism, and that of the contemporary Booker ethos.
The toothless, gentle, atheist-but-spiritual style of a book like Orbital falls, I think, into the popular bracket of ‘wellbeing’ literature. There is no shortage of the genre, spread as it is across nature, memoir, travel and fiction. Perhaps most at prey to this repackaging is poetry. Multiple ‘poetry pharmacies’ now exist to sell prescriptions and anthologies depending on the patient’s mood or stress. Looked at this way, the directionless politics is almost the point. Instead of allowing for doubt to linger, or for a piece of writing to leave us feeling challenged, wellbeing literature exists to soothe. It is already a difficult and confusing world, it says. Why should your reading – your free time – be difficult also?
At one point in Orbital, the six crew members, representatives of different nation states, come together to hug. ‘Without word or reason they sail inwards and join, twelve arms interlinked. Buona notte, o-yasumi, spakoynay, nochee, sweet dreams, goodnight. Hands squeezing shoulders and ruffling hair.’ On the next page, a typhoon hits and rips the Philippines to shreds. Ah, you might think. Something real and hard to swallow has taken place. But it turns out no. Harvey has thought ahead, because living down there is a nameless fisherman, one Pietro made friends with once on a holiday (what are the chances, you might ask? With wellbeing writing, think less about chances, more about miracles.) While the airports and bridges of the Philippines are destroyed, the fisherman, his wife and kids are mercifully saved. What saves them? The walls of a church, and a ‘little embroidered effigy of child Jesus’.
How God is approached in Orbital is perhaps the best way to look at its directionless optimism, and that of the contemporary Booker ethos. As with many of the novel’s moral or ethical inquiries, Harvey skirts the idea of a universal creator without ever committing to one. A Christian theology is briefly intimated in the example above, but the appearance is disconnected, superficial. Otherwise, Harvey follows Carl Sagan’s lead in regard to God and the cosmos: everywhere there is awe, and all of it is manmade.
Once again stepping between reader and novel, Harvey’s narrator offers an explanation: ‘Sometimes they look at the earth and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true […] could still be led to believe that God himself had dropped it there. […] Yet it’s clearly not that kingly earth of old, a God-given clod.’ With the idea of a creator wiped clean, we’re left to ask: where do the novel’s miracles come from? Why does that Filipino church stand against a typhoon? Where a novel like The Employees draws light from a deep well – hard-won, fraught – Orbital absorbs light indiscriminately. It is endlessly optimistic, radiating in all directions. There is nobody to accuse and nothing to truly interrogate, and language exists only in the light of an endless present, medicating against the flux of a potential future.
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Connor Harrison’s writing has appeared in the TLS, LA Review of Books and Evergreen Review, among others, and he has a column at Boundless Magazine. He currently lives in London.
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