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Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Reading Spacecraft 6: The child is father to the man

Morton begins Spacecraft by talking about his childhood as an eleven year old boy coming from a family of limited means and walking to school in the morning, going “toward the ... alienating land of a very posh private school” (p. 1). In that context he took comfort in “making up spacecraft. I would inhabit them in the cockpit of my mind, describing their specifications to myself, under my breath.” When I first read those words I merely read them on the way to what came next, which was about seeing Star Wars and, a bit later, Close Encounters of the Third Kind – both came out in 1977, when he was nine – about his collections of models, and books.

Yet, as I read Morton’s account of his childhood engagement with space flight, I thought of my own, which was a bit different as I am a generation older. For me the movie was Forbidden Planet, which came out in the same year as Godzilla King of the Monsters, 1956. I spent hours drawing pictures of flying saucers and robots. But the definitive event came early in October of 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, thereby launching the so-called “space race” into overdrive. That’s when my personal imaginary met world history. I didn’t think in those terms at the time, that formulation came to me only in retrospect.

I’m wondering whether or not Morton’s childhood encounter with space-themed science fiction had a similar valence for him. And not only for him, but for many other children as well. Thus, after recounting that aspect of his childhood, Morton observes (p. 2):

I was using space craft as protection and escape vehicle in my head. And so, to this day, I’ve wanted to explore what that was all about. In particular that’s because I’m sure I’m not the only one.

No, he’s not. How many of us are there? Morton continues in the next paragraph:

This doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in Apollo or the Space Shuttle, or Soyuz, or Sputnik. Far from it. The whole point about those vehicles is that they also originated in some dream of a human being. The Space Shuttle bears a vivid resemblance to the shuttle as imagined by Stanley Kubrick in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). And to design real spacecraft you need a big imagination.

When I was young science fiction was a relatively minor genre, both in film and on television (not to mention prose fiction). The Western was much more important. I’d guess that the Western wouldn’t have been so important in Britain, especially on TV, but I have no idea what the British equivalent would have been. My point, though, is that however much I loved Westerns, and I did love them, and how much time me and my friends played at “cowboys and Indians” – not to mention that I wanted to be an Indian when I grew up – they were set in the past. There was almost no way I could forge an adulthood around one of the typical characters from a Western. I wasn’t going to be a cowboy, much less an Indian.

But an astronaut, that’s different. That had possibilities. I thought about that. But gave it up in favor of being a scientist or an engineer. But for whatever reason, I declared a psychology major when I went off to college; graduated with a degree in philosophy; and then went off to get a doctorate in English Literature. Still, about a decade after getting the degree I did manage to spend a summer working with NASA on a project involving artificial intelligence.

I digress. In pursuing Morton’s childhood (and mine), I’m not attempting to shoehorn Spacecraft into old-fashioned biographical criticism whereby one seeks to explain a text by finding its secrets in the author’s autobiography. There’s nothing secret of hidden about Morton’s childhood introduction to spacecraft. He tells us about it the very first thing. It’s part of the story he’s telling. And that, he later tells us, is a story common to many children whose imagination has been fired with visions of space travel. It’s a story born of a specific cultural imaginary common among children of the last decades of the previous century.

Such children couldn’t have existed prior to the second half of the twentieth century. Why not? Because the culture didn’t provide the materials on which such an imagination could feed itself. Sure, science fiction novels existed before then, as did magazines build on science fiction stories, and some science fiction stories did show up in the movies, But they weren’t so pervasive and readily available to children as they became in the 1950s. Nor did they exist in the context of an international competition, the Cold War, that made the conquest (a word I chose deliberately) of space a matter of national and international importance.

That competition reached an inflection point in the late 1960s, at about the time Morton was born (in 1968). Stanley Kubrick redefined science fiction when he released 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. The special effects were a quantum level superior to those in any prior science fiction films and, by starting the film in the ancient past, when there were no humans on earth, Kubrick situated the mythos of spaceflight in the history of life on earth. Thus, with the help of Arthur C. Clarke, who collaborated on the script, Kubrick situated space flight in the mythos and imaginary of the human, thereby freeing it from the trapping of the late industrial revolution.

A year after that NASA landed Apollo 11 on the moon. What Kubrick had depicted in fiction, in imagination, in one of the most important science fiction films ever made, NASA had made real. Space travel was no longer something that happened only in the cultural imaginary. It had entered the realm of the Real, of what Morton called the “future future. Futurality is the possibility that things could be different” (p. 73). Space travel is more than rockets and phasers, super-smart computers, aliens, and the possibility of faster-than-light travel. It is the possibility of radical transformation. As Morton says at the beginning of his last paragraph (pp. 110): “The millennium (as in falcon) is hyperspace, that post-apocalyptic moment at which a more just world is established.” NASA may have been funded out of a desire to score points against the nation Ronald Reagan would come to call an evil empire (1983), but it was never captive to, subsumed by, that intention. It played on a much larger stage.

But I want to go back to childhood. The late-60s conjunction of Kublick and NASA also saw the original Star Trek on television (1965-1969). A decade later The Muppet Show ran on British and American television between 1976 and 1981. It had a running segment entitled “Pigs in Space,” which was a parody on 1960s and 1970s space operas. That is to say, by that time space travel was established well enough that it could evoke and support parodies in a television show aimed at children (the kind of children’s show that appealed to adults as well). Morton watched it “all the time” he tells me (I asked him in the Twitterverse). And though I didn’t ask him whether or not he watched Doctor Who, I assume that he did so, because 1) it started in 1963 (and has been on television ever since), 2) he mentions it fairly often in the book.

That brings us to our Wordsworthian subtitle: “The child is father to the man.” Just what we’re supposed to do with it, I’m not sure. Contemplate it? Re-read the post?

I know what I want. Hegel had a word for it: Aufhebung. Uttering the word is easy enough. Performing the act, allowing it to perform you. That is not so easy.

‘Till next time.

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