James R. Hood

12 April, 2004

Research Review for Ronald Weber’s “The View from Space: Notes on Space Exploration and Recent Writing”

            Ronald Weber’s article, entitled “The View from Space: Notes on Space Exploration and Recent Writing,” appears in the Georgia Review in 1979—a decade after the first moon landing—and comments on the then-recent approaches to writing on the subject of space exploration. Although one must bear in mind that this article was written twenty-five years ago and therefore only reflects space exploration writings up to that point, one might also consider that the past quarter-century has seen little change in those approaches to the writing of space exploration that Weber reviews in his article, particularly since the literature from this genre at that time touches on many aspects of space exploration that are still relevant topics in current literary offerings on the subject.

            Weber begins this article with a quote from The Fork River Space Project, a novel by Wright Morris, which states that “The view into space is unending, and a measure of man’s creative cunning, but the view from space compels the awe that will enlarge man’s finite nature,” (Weber 280). While this statement suggests that one might expect space exploration to compel any individual fortunate enough to have experienced it firsthand to produce literature as profound and awe-inspiring as that “view from space,” Weber points out that this theory is at odds with the notion, as Norman Mailer posits in Of a Fire on the Moon, “that it would not be until men who ‘spoke like Shakespeare’ rode the rockets that we would possess an appropriate response to the adventure into space” (Weber 281). Weber also writes that prior to the first moon landing, an Esquire magazine article had stated that “while the space program is poised on the brink of a truly epoch-making triumph of engineering, it is also headed for a rhetorical wreck,” implying that any attempt by those directly involved with the program to produce a literary work befitting the significance of the event would surely fall short of the program’s technological success (Weber 280). Despite Mailer’s lamentations and the Esquire article’s predictions about the literature of space exploration, Weber offers his thoughts on the writings about space exploration of that period, and he finds that much of it does succeed, and in ways somewhat more relevant to those of us who remain “earth-bound explorers.”

            One of the first books that Weber refers to is Buzz Aldrin’s Return to Earth, which recounts that astronaut’s struggle with the psychological effects of having “returned from where no man had been before” (Weber 282). Aldrin claims that setting foot on the deck of the USS Hornet “was actually the start of the trip to the unknown. I had known what to expect on the unknown moon more than I did on the unfamiliar earth” (Weber 282). Aldrin’s journey is therefore psychological as well as physical, which answers Course Objective # 1’s question: “Can the ‘map of unknown territory’ become a metaphor for the explorer’s mind?” Using this “return to Earth” as a literary connective, Weber continues, stating that “In recent writing space exploration tends to function as it does in Aldrin’s book: as a means of turning new attention back to earth” (Weber 282). Weber states that “the end of all exploration, T.S. Eliot has told us, is ‘to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,’” which is somewhat ironic (Weber 282).

Weber also offers John Updike’s Rabbit Redux as an example of how space exploration literature lends itself easily to irony. Early in the novel, Rabbit Angstrom and his friends are watching the evening news coverage of the upcoming Apollo 11 moon landing, which the media has likened to Columbus and his “discovery” of a new world. Weber states, however, that “’as far as Rabbit can see it’s the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly what they’re aiming at and it’s a big round nothing.’ For Rabbit it is indeed nothing since it has no bearing on his struggle to keep some slight foothold on the land Columbus hit” (Weber 283).

Other writers, however, see space exploration as not only having some relevance to life on this planet, but as a means for mitigating the problems of overpopulation and the inevitable exhaustion of natural resources, and Weber examines the works of several of these authors as well in this article. In assessing the role of technology in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Sammler posits that “’The powers that had made the earth too small could free us from confinement,’” and  “wonders if the kind of moon colonization envisioned by Lal might not, by draining off earthly numbers, make the planet a more habitable place for growing numbers caught up in a passion for boundlessness and wholeness, people who will acknowledge no limits on their lives, who want everything and will tolerate nothing less” (Weber 285). In the end, however, Weber points out that Sammler observes the “willingness of many…to remain in earth-bound anxiety and perform their duties,” illustrating that “The earth is for Sammler, as it was for Dr. Gruner, finally sufficient. It still provides a landscape in which lives can fulfill a capacity to become human” (Weber 287). Indirectly, it seems, this literature bolsters the “return to Earth” theme seen earlier through its “remain on Earth” message.

Weber writes that another and “more direct use of a return-to-earth conception of space exploration is as a transcendent experience through which earthly problems are seen with sudden clarity and consequently take on fresh urgency” (Weber 287), a theme that we see in some films, as well, such as Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), with its warning of the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Weber notes that “In the work of Anne Morrow Lindbergh the use of the return-to-earth theme turns on an awareness of the ecological interdependence of earth rather than a vision of human corruption and mismanagement” (Weber 289). In Earth Shine, she joins an essay about space exploration, “The Heron and the Astronaut,” with an essay about a trip to Africa, entitled “Immersion in Life,” since, she claims, “that space exploration has drawn fresh attention to earth, and it was in Africa that man took the first evolutionary steps that led him to the moon and the opportunity to view the earth from space” (Weber 289).

The notion of using, as the Morris quote at the beginning of Weber’s article suggests, a “view from space” as a catalyst for a “reexamination” of earth’s problems—or, on a lesser scale, for personal introspection or “exploration” that leads to some insights into the uncharted territory of one’s own mind—therefore is the focus of much of Weber’s article, which leads us to ask some new questions about the genre of space and exploration literature:

1)                 Should the works of literature in this subject area focus more on the technical aspects of the genre, or is the “human element” of these writings more important / relevant to most readers?

2)                 If the latter of these two choices is more important / relevant to readers, what does the genre of space exploration literature offer that other genres (e.g., “self-help” books, Utopian / Dystopian literature, etc.) do not?

3)                 Is it the “return to earth” from that “view from space” that compels us, as Weber and Morris suggest, to “enlarge our finite nature” or is that “growth” possible through other means?

Work Cited

Weber, Ronald. “The View from Space: Notes on Space Explration and Recent Writing.” Georgia Review 33 (1979): 280-296.