Sample Final Essays 2002

Kelly Tumy

Q:        What is gained by studying Literature of Space and Exploration, for either a student of literature, a teacher, or the general public? 

A:        What is gained from studying the Literature of Space and Exploration?  This is no easy question to answer for the response can be so varied and difficult to tie down.  But, let’s give it a try.  For me, a student of literature, the literature of space and exploration opened up new avenues of both hard-core research and genre study.  The possibility regarding research is perhaps the most dominant idea that emerged from this class.  When we look at the Ice pieces, we see that almost all of the explorers wrote about the expeditions to the South Pole, yet very little has been anthologized about the North Pole.  Even Edgar Allan Poe chose the Antarctic as his milieu in which to set Arthur Gordon Pym because of the fascination it held at the time.  How then has one Pole gained more notoriety than the other if both are uninhabited and ice-locked entities?  Perhaps it is the fact that the South Pole lies below an equator for most of the exploration countries and is therefore a kind of reverse world for them to explore.  By venturing that far south, they also tested the limits of geography.  For, although we knew at the time that the Earth was round, it was probably a bit of a thrill to go that far south and not fall off into oblivion. 

But how does this all connect to the research aspect?  Cherry-Garrard hit on this topic a bit with his scientific endeavor with the Emperor penguins but loses his research narrative in the frigid descriptions of the pole; Marie Herbert also touches on this a bit with her excerpt from The Snow People.  Herbert’s narrative attempts to show a more human side, more human connections in her writing, but she still does not convey a cohesive narrative even in this excerpt.  She muses at the beginning about how Eskimo lives would be different without alcohol and then proceeds to tell about the country she lives in, the people she meets, the events they attend.  All throughout these descriptions the reader wonders where the initial “research idea” has gone.  These two writers attempt to give readers a more research-based writing.  They were out to discover something, to impart more knowledge on a given subject than we had before.  But they ran into the problem of these writers of exploration literature:  how to handle the narrative.  But not all the polar stories are poorly handled narratives.  We gain insight into cultures we might never before have been exposed to.  Pym is an incredible mélange of characters and situations and what we take from Pym is the sense of adventure, the risks taken on the high seas, and the consequences of poor planning.  We want to meet Dirk Peters and we want him on our team.  The rich character types will live on past Pym and will enrich others’ writing if they take on this kind of genre again.  We can take from Pym more clues on how to control a narrative and watch the development.  These writers were more wrapped up in the science or the discovery rather than the craft of writing.  And this is one of the major themes that did emerge from the course:  why are there few fluent or exceptional writings concerning the literature of space and exploration?  Why is the genre so varied and affected by space and exploration?

It’s not that this kind of literature does not exist; it is just that it takes a different form than most literature students are comfortable with.  If you take Red Mars, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Left Hand of Darkness, you see a miraculously well-handled narrative.  The stories work, the characters do develop.  These are stunning works of fiction:  science fiction.  And perhaps that is our answer.  Only when the authors blend the scientific and the fictitious do we get a richly developed piece. We expect all literature to fall into the rich and rewarding category, but some literature, especially the literature of space and exploration, will, at times, take on a drier quality and will simply communicate descriptions of terrain found along the way and of scientific discoveries made.  It seems that only in the realm of science fiction do we get the “First Hundred” and their trials and tribulations on this strange new planet, Mars; we meet Michael Valentine, fall in love with him because of his gross inadequacies and wish somehow we, too, could be his caretakers; finally we are frightened by the thought of a place like Winter, but we are also intrigued.  For as well as it is depicted, it frightens us a bit to think one day we could see a civilization like that.  Science fiction for all the “slings and arrows” it takes from literature critics, does offer students a more rounded and well-crafted story.

Samantha and I had a discussion earlier this semester that bears directly on this point.  As you know, I was a self-professed “science-fiction” doubter.  I had serious doubts as to the validity of the genre.  I made the argument that the story had to be factual for me to buy the story.  Samantha asked did it have to be factual or believable?  And the more I examined this question, the more I came to understand that, for me—a student of literature—it simply had to be believable.  At first I was tied up in the “non-believability” of Princess of Mars, but failed to see what Burroughs was doing.  He simply created, what he believed at the time, a quasi-believable scenario of life of Mars.  I think that is why so many people have trouble with science fiction.  They don’t see it as it evolves, and they need to.  Science fiction will change every year that science changes; therefore, these changes will be constant in the genre.  As students of literature, we need to be more tolerant of these changes and we need to let the narrative change as the subject matter changes.  The literature of space will not look the same in 10 years as it does now.  Instead, it will be more factual; it will be more reliable—scientifically.  But, I would venture to guess, it will be just as engaging to read as has this collection of space literature.

Q:        What did you learn about exploration and its representation by literature?

A:        What did I learn?  I learned ten-fold more than I originally thought I knew.  I learned that male and female writers handle their narratives differently, especially in the realm of exploration literature.  Cherry-Garrard was much more exacting in his descriptions than was Robyn Davidson.  But that is not to say Davidson’s narrative suffered any because of this void.  Her narrative gave a more emotional glimpse into a woman’s struggle against several elements.  Cherry-Garrard’s narrative was more descriptive of landscape and weather conditions.  Both included elements that suited their narrative purpose.

Scott’s narrative was more emotional than Cherry-Garrard’s and much more exact.  We can owe this discrepancy, if you care to call it that, to the fact that Scott led the expedition and had much more invested in the expedition than did Cherry-Garrard.  These are not the things we usually take into consideration when we read a novel.  Take Bless Me, Ultima, for example.  We do not worry that Tony is being honest with us, that all the young boys in the novel are correctly characterized, or that he gives his parents fair narrative time.  We care simply what happens to Tony and Ultima.  But in the literature of exploration, the literature takes on different qualities.  Writers strive to be both exact and poetic at the same times.  They strive to convey their experiences, and make them worthy of reading:  a difficult task at best.

But most of the authors studied this semester do have that readable quality.  Even though Nancy Mitford recounts the Scott expedition for readers, an expedition with which all are now quite familiar, she does so with the grace and agility of a skilled write and we are more in tuned with the loss and the inevitably fatal trip Scott embarked upon. 

I learned that the literature of exploration extends far beyond the familiars of Cabeza de Vaca and the expedition of Lewis and Clark.  For exploration is only limited by what we limit our minds limit it to.  We see the title of a course and we think we know what it will entail.  I thought I was in for the explorers I am familiar with:  de Vaca, Columbus, de la Salle, Lewis and Clark, possibly even  20^th century explorers like John Glenn or Jim Lovell.  What I received instead was a new look at all literatures.  I see most of the literature I study now in relation to the known              unknown chart.  I can fit different pieces I have studied into this chart and apply this analysis to much of what I already know about literature.

I learned that the literature of exploration is more varied than any genre I have studied thus far.  It also has the capability to be far more diversified than any genre literature students study.  For science will always be evolving and will always changes and therefore the literature must change right along with it.  Who knows, there may be a poet yet who can convince us that Mars and the Moon are the next places we need to visit.  Until then, we rely on the Kim Stanley Robinson’s and the Ursula le Guin’s to take us there for just a visit and bring us back again to the realms with which we are familiar.