{"id":34756,"date":"2020-04-16T14:49:23","date_gmt":"2020-04-16T13:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cupblog.bluefusesystems.com\/?p=34756"},"modified":"2020-05-05T17:04:58","modified_gmt":"2020-05-05T16:04:58","slug":"a-fantasy-of-elsewhere-vs-the-reality-of-here-revisiting-the-odyssey-in-pandemic-induced-isolation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2020\/04\/16\/a-fantasy-of-elsewhere-vs-the-reality-of-here-revisiting-the-odyssey-in-pandemic-induced-isolation\/","title":{"rendered":"A fantasy of Elsewhere vs the reality of Here: revisiting The Odyssey in pandemic-induced isolation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cStaying Here may be our only option during the current pandemic, but it would be too simple to declare this the only right answer for all time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s weird\u2014yes, everything is weird now\u2014to try to think about the colonization of Elsewhere while in pandemic-induced stationary isolation. On the one hand: wouldn\u2019t it be great to get out of Here, which is small and cramped and toxic? (My Here is a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, from which the skyscrapers of Manhattan now seem light-years distant.) On the other hand: how the hell could we even consider going Elsewhere, given that we control Here so poorly that we can\u2019t even go across town?<\/p>\n

This is the context in which you, reader, will hear news of my article called \u201cSpeculative Fiction, Ecocriticism, and the Wanderings of Odysseus<\/a>.\u201d Were I to retitle it for the COVID-19 era, I\u2019d go with something like \u201cAllow the fantasy of Elsewhere to convince you that staying Here isn\u2019t so bad after all.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s clearly the message of Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s Aurora <\/em>(2015). A spaceship arrives at the planet Aurora after a generations-long flight from Earth. At first this New World seems okay, albeit excessively windy. Soon, however, the astronauts suffer a truly horrific revelation: there is a miniscule viral parasite in the planet\u2019s atmosphere that will kill any human whose spacesuit it penetrates. There is no possibility of eliminating this entity from the planet, and to coexist with it would require that humans remain forever confined to the suffocating protection of their spacesuits.<\/p>\n

So all the humans must abandon Aurora; they all agree on that. But they can\u2019t agree on which direction to go instead. One group wants to travel to a more distant star system that may (or may not) contain a more hospitable planet. The other group wants to return to Earth, reasoning that Earth is the only planet in the universe they can know for sure is not toxic. The novel follows this second group, and in the end they achieve a measure of happiness. The novel concludes with these sentences: \u201cWhat a world. She lets her head down and kisses the sand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robinson\u2019s two groups of astronauts correspond to two different versions of the premodern Odysseus\/Ulysses. The first group, those who persist in heading Elsewhere, are like Dante\u2019s Ulysses, who exhorts his men to sail beyond the pillars of Hercules saying \u201cdo not deny yourselves the chance to know\u201d (Inferno <\/em>26.116, Hollander translation), and like the astronauts aboard the spaceship Ares<\/em> in Stanley Weinbaum\u2019s science fiction short story \u201cA Martian Odyssey,\u201d who aim to extract monetizable knowledge from the inhabitants of Mars. The second group, those who return Home, is like the Homeric Odysseus, who after barely escaping the Cyclops Polyphemus\u2014the feat on which his reputation as the patron saint of technophiles rests\u2014suffers one defeat after another in the land of Elsewhere and only recovers his manly agency after finding his way back Home.<\/p>\n

In the article I argue that the Homeric Odyssey <\/em>implicitly recommends to its listeners the value of \u2018ecological caution,\u2019 which at its simplest just means not being overconfident in one\u2019s ability to control the physical world. I also argue that much of the genre of science fiction tends to inculcate this value, even if the genre is typically thought to\u2014and sometimes does\u2014inspire hubristic technophilia. I offer a theoretical framework for these arguments based on Istvan Csicsery-Ronay\u2019s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Staying Here may be our only option during the current pandemic, but it would be too simple to declare this the only right answer for all time. After Odysseus successfully returns home, he remains troubled by a prophecy Teiresias had given him at the farthest point in his wanderings (the edge of the underworld): before his death, Odysseus will have to travel inland, carrying a ship\u2019s oar, until he finds people \u201cwho know nothing of the sea\u201d and who mistake his oar for a winnowing fan (Odyssey<\/em> 11.119-137 and 23.263-84). This prophecy lends an unsettling openness to the epic just at its strongest point of closure, not unlike the thought of that other group of astronauts that troubles one\u2019s enjoyment of the sandy kiss that concludes Robinson\u2019s Aurora<\/em>\u2026especially if one has read Liu Cixin\u2019s mind-altering Remembrance of Earth\u2019s Past <\/em>trilogy, in which the astronauts who choose to set course for another star system turn out (spoiler alert) to have been right in a big way.<\/p>\n

When we do get back to going Elsewhere, whether that\u2019s across town or to a Nature reserve or to Mars, we should at least be more mindful that what we\u2019re doing participates in multiple histories and fantasy futures of colonization. Perhaps giving some thought now to the Odyssey<\/em> and speculative fiction can help with that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Samuel Cooper is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Languages at Bard High School Early College Queens. Beginning in fall 2020, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. He received his PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cStaying Here may be our only option during the current pandemic, but it would be too simple to declare this the only right answer for all time.\u201d It\u2019s weird\u2014yes, everything is weird now\u2014to try to think about the colonization of Elsewhere while in pandemic-induced stationary isolation. On the one hand: wouldn\u2019t it be great to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":857,"featured_media":34758,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,6],"tags":[1897,56,7354,7357,7349,7356,55,7352,7353,7351,7256,7358,7355,7350],"coauthors":[7348],"class_list":["post-34756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classics","category-humanities","tag-classical-studies","tag-classics-2","tag-ecocriticism","tag-elsewhere","tag-greek-myth","tag-here","tag-history-2","tag-homer","tag-isolation","tag-odysseus","tag-pandemic","tag-rmu","tag-speculative-fiction","tag-the-odyssey"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/857"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34756"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=34756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}