Air Travel Fiction and Film

Cloud People

Erica Durante

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030526504
• eBook ISBN: 9783030526511
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People explores how, over the past four decades, fiction and film have transformed our perceptions and representations of contemporary air travel. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of a wide range of international cultural productions, and elucidates the paradigms and narratives that constitute our current imaginary of air mobility. Erica Durante advances the hypothesis that fiction and film have converted the Airworld—the world of airplanes and airport infrastructures—into a pivotal anthropological place that is endowed with social significance and identity, suggesting that the assimilation of the sky into our cultural imaginary and lifestyle has metamorphosed human society into "Cloud People." In its examination of the representations of air travel as an epicenter of today's world, the book not only illustrates a novel perspective on contemporary fiction, but fills an important gap in the study of globalization within literary and film studies.

© The Author(s) 2020

E. DuranteAir Travel Fiction and FilmStudies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Erica Durante¹

(1)

Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

Erica Durante

Keywords

AeromobilitiesAirAir mobilityAir travelAir travel cultureAir travel fictionAir travel imaginaryAirworldMobilities studiesCultural studiesCultural globalization

End Abstract

1 Skyward

In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville explores and questions the hypnotic and mysterious attraction of the human gaze and mind to the captivating forces of the ocean. From the beginning of the story, the narrator, Ishmael, is astounded by the number of people willing to travel long distances to contemplate the sea from close proximity:

[H]ere come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. […] They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. In-landers all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? (Melville 1952, 2)

Ishmael would today, two hundred years after Moby-Dick, ascribe a similar “magnetic virtue” to the sky. Thus, if Melville were to write a novel about the individual’s relationship to an element other than the water, he would most likely choose the air. He would describe our glance skyward, pondering the destinations of thousands of airplanes that cruise above us daily. The descriptions of whaling ships would be replaced by equally monumental portrayals of airplanes hovering across the blue sky, sketching white lines with their turbines (Fig. 1). Mutatis mutandis, Captain Ahab’s obsession with the enormous white sperm whale could remain at the heart of Moby-Dick, if Melville were to draw inspiration from the protagonist of the Argentinean novel in which an “air harpooner” confuses airplanes for giant white whales (Costagliola 2016). Similarly, rather than depicting sailors at work aboard the Pequod, he would describe the protocols of flight crews and passengers circumnavigating the globe in just over fifty hours.

Fig. 1

Matthieu Gafsou, Galerie C.: Photograph from the Ether series (Courtesy of the artist)

The reference to Melville’s novel highlights the gap between two major moments in human history. Having remained empty of any vehicle for thousands of years, the sky has gradually been populated by an exorbitant number of airplanes, particularly over the course of the last seventy years with the rise of commercial aviation. Under the virgin skies of the nineteenth century, in the absence of any event that could anticipate the future of aircraft, Melville could hardly have envisioned the existence of the Airworld. Even the unbounded imagination of Jules Verne, author of adventure novels such as Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1863), falters in describing the aerial views of the East African lands over which his characters fly in a hydrogen balloon. Based on the knowledge and representations of the time, Melville and Verne were more accustomed to imagining life at sea than human movement through the sky. At the antipodes of the ocean and of the earth, the sky belonged to the sphere of the divine, transcendence, and immateriality, rather than to progress and technology.

It was only in the early twentieth century that the introduction and increasing flow of airplanes (airmail, military, and commercial) changed the direction and perception of our gaze and our way of conceiving ourselves as humans that can fulfill the dream of takeoff and flight. This two-directional verticalization has affected the contemporary imaginary of air voyage and our relationship with gravity, altitude, and even falling, as revealed in an extreme fashion during the 9/11 attacks.¹ As natural environments domesticated by humans, the sky and the earth are now entwined in our visual and spatial representations of the planet. Due to the condition of elevation (and of levitation) that air travel permits, our view has evolved and has gradually detached from the ground.²

Despite their small windows, airplanes allow travelers to enjoy the once-unthinkable experience of being above and amidst the clouds, no longer feeling the earth below. As much as our perception has been reshaped by the novel view of the horizon that the aerial environment offers, our condition as humans and travelers has been reconfigured by this specific setting. The flight paradoxically exposes us to an inevitable distance from the external aerial landscape that envelops us. Nevertheless, the visual experience of the sky through the aircraft window necessarily implies the presence of an irremovable transparent filter that impedes our immersion and direct interaction with the sky. Unlike land or sea travel, where photography allows us to insert our bodies into the landscape and transform it into a scenery (Crawshaw and Urry 1997, 194), we cannot modify or appropriate the atmosphere in the context of air travel.

Air mobility reveals the air landscape and excludes us from being air tourists. Our attitude in the aerial environment is comparable to that of Verne’s character Phileas Fogg, who is predominantly driven by his quest to demonstrate that it is feasible to travel around the world in eighty days. Similarly, our air journey is not driven by the desire to visit the place we are traveling through, but by our impatient wish to reach our destination and thus the end of the journey. In reality, we have only one option to appropriate the air landscape and transform it into a scenery: include ourselves as creators or characters of the stories that we place or experience in the Airworld. Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People explores the cultural influences of international contemporary fiction, both literature and film, on our perception of the Airworld and on air travel.

2 From Aeromobilities to Airportness

This book is based on a comprehensive exploration of a wide range of literary and cinematic sources across different languages, cultures, and regions. It studies the central role of the imaginary of air travel in contemporary cultural productions, and the effects of these cultural productions on our perception of the Airworld. Its analysis does not disregard the anthropological ties that have bound fiction to the aerial environment since the emergence of mythological narratives and throughout the pioneering age of aviation; it focuses on literary and cinematic creations that have transformed our representations of the Airworld in the past four decades, since the rise of globalization.

Air Travel Fiction and Film goes beyond the apparent superficial and operational aspects of the functioning of the Airworld. Fiction unveils the human side (humanized and humanist) of this space, which is usually perceived as the prototype of anonymity and optimization. In engaging with the many heterogeneous narratives that take place in the Airworld or contain references to its annexes, this book affirms our identity as “Cloud People.” It analyzes how our relationship with ourselves, others, and the world is shaped by air mobility and its constant hybridization of travel in the sky and life on earth. This book examines the complexity of this phenomenon from a literary and cultural studies perspective. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines fundamental insights on the study of air travel from a wide range of disciplines, including the anthropology of globalization, architecture, contemporary philosophy, geography, mobility studies, and communication and media studies.

Scholars of mobility studies have played a particularly important role in shaping our understanding of the intricate “practices, spaces, and subjects” of today’s air voyages (Cresswell and Merriman 2011) and their sociopolitical and cultural implications. The field of mobility studies, which examines contemporary air travel through a broad lens that exceeds the primary transportatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Airworld as an In-between Space
• 3. Time Out of Control
• 4. Luxury in the Sky with More Than Diamonds
• 5. Cloud People: Identities and Paradoxes
• 6. Connections, Disconnections, and Reconnections
• 7. Coda: Flying Over
• Back Matter