key: cord-0060859-qdyrqwkv
authors: Durante, Erica
title: Coda: Flying Over
date: 2020-08-04
journal: Air Travel Fiction and Film
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1_7
sha: 022e6f82eb6cf04af239a1c973003ea0ee83f21b
doc_id: 60859
cord_uid: qdyrqwkv

This chapter reflects upon our projections about, and expectations for, the future of the Airworld. It analyzes the uncertainty and fear of obsolescence that characterizes our imaginary of air travel and aerial infrastructures. The chapter further underscores the central paradox of air mobility fiction in the broader context of travel literature. While recounting the circulation of passengers across the globe, air travel narratives surprisingly uncover experiences of immobility.

The complex and uncertain condition of suspension associated with air travel is reflected in the original French title of his essay, which poses the question, "Where to land?" (Où atterrir?). Latour ponders how we would envision our future "if there is no planet, no earth, no soil, no territory to house the Globe" (5). Moored in the sky and clinging to the aftermath of a globalized world, we, the floating humans as metaphorically depicted by Latour, are observing the world, gazing down to earth. We examine the surface of planet Earth without knowing where "to attempt a crash landing" (32), desperately wondering whether we can land at all. As contemporary inhabitants of the global world, we can indeed relate to the puzzling state Latour describes as we recognize the mixed feelings of disorientation to which he alludes. This vulnerability haunts us when we revert our gaze skyward to contemplate the future of air travel and imagine the day when we will tour outer space.

This state of uncertainty is, indeed, not limited to the possible failure of our dream of globalization and our anxiety about the fate of planet Earth, but also reflects our unawareness of the place that we will occupy in the sky and in space. Indeed, the aerial environment continues to challenge us even as it escapes us, although we domesticate it and navigate through it daily using increasingly sophisticated aeronautic technology. The aerial milieu has been perceived since the onset of aviation as a space that leans toward the future, promises the expansion of humanity in alternative environments, and exposes us to the unpredictable. At present, we can only imagine future advancements of aircraft technology and speculate about future air journeys. We are confronted by the question of where to land; yet, we ignore where we are heading and how we will take off in the future.

This projection into the future that characterizes the imaginary of air travel and the development of air mobility infrastructures is accompanied by a disturbing fear of obsolescence. We are confident that we have mastered virtually all the required knowledge about the Airworld. Nevertheless, despite our impressive command of nearly every gesture and behavior of the perfect traveler, the abrupt emergence of air routes, new control procedures, and innovative services cause us to feel "outdated" with respect to the relentless evolution of the Airworld. Air mobility tends to absorb and amplify unprecedented global circumstances. This is evident in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the collapse of air travel in the wake of the outbreak has brought with it the temporary fall of the Cloud People.

The dramatic reality of this highly contagious disease reaffirms our inability to keep up with the Airworld. The provisional decline of air voyage inevitably amplifies the sense of obsolescence that defines air mobility as a whole and threatens our cultural imaginary of the Airworld. Airports and airplanes are pervaded with uncertainty and uncontrollable fear of contracting deadly infections. Consequently, they have also been deprived of those notions of leisure, luxury, connectivity and fluidity, inspiring nostalgia and regret. It is, however, possible and even likely that, as was the case after the devastation of 9/11, the Airworld will resume its supersonic spinning, will project the future onto the present state of the world, and will propel us far and fast into the time to come. Our superficial and short-term memory of the factual contingencies of the Airworld does not, however, prevent us from creating and setting new narratives in this environment that condenses all spaces and times at once. The Airworld is driven by the constant movement of a wide variety of individuals, and endowed with a creative and stimulating dimension in terms of the representations and artistic and cultural productions that it generates. This book explores the extraordinary and invigorating potential of this pivotal contemporary space. It analyzes international literature and film since the early 1980s, shedding new light on how air travel has become a defining paradigm of our symbolic and cultural imaginary and the way that we operate in the world. The immense number of narratives and characters set in the Airworld enlivens this space with innumerable manifestations of affectivity, sociability, and solidarity. Contemporary literary and cinematic fiction thus revise the paradigm of obsolescence, redeeming the Airworld from being a mere symbol of futuristic technological achievements of the aeronautic industry.

The book covers numerous narratives, in a variety of formats and genres, lending shape and voice to the flow of human beings who crisscross the sky and turn it into a parallel space to earth in every dimension. Fiction populates aircraft, airports, and airport hotels with a multitude of lives and feelings, reversing the crystallized notion of "non-place" (Augé 1995) and rehabilitating the Airworld as an anthropological place, endowed with identity, relationship, and memory. With its focus on the human, social, and affective dimensions of the Airworld that transcend its primary function of mobility, the book further explores the rise of a global population of "Cloud People." This term refers to the heterogeneous mass of individuals, ten million per day and over four billion per year (IATA 2018), who remain invisible behind the colorful global flight flows captured by flight trackers. Neither angelic representations nor anthropomorphic comparisons with migratory birds ("Bird People") are sufficient to portray contemporary air travelers. The aerial milieu does not modify us anatomically, but rather allows us to maintain our human ontology as it empowers us with the opportunity of reaching the sky and flying across the world. Transformed by air travel into homines aerii, we can now locate ourselves in the air and experience states that would otherwise remain unknown to us.

Paradoxically, these fictions of hypermobility condense time and space to give rise to narratives that reflect immobility. Instead of recounting the movement itself, and the discovery of the places it entails, the stories emerge from the inertia of the journey. Airworld fiction thus renews the traditional paradigms of travel literature, highlighting a clear rupture with this genre. The voyage is no longer recounted per se, since it takes place in the unaltered airport and airplane scenery, without any room for exoticism. Ordinary and trivialized air travel circumstances nevertheless infuse fluid and rapid momentum into the narrative, producing a truly global literature and film. These transindividual fictions, describing various intersections and interactions of this heterogeneous community of Cloud People, also highlight the tension between the globalized thinking of our society and the attachment to the local.

These defining patterns of contemporary fiction also emerge in recent texts which this book-also a victim of obsolescence and the impossibility of exhaustiveness-has, unfortunately, been unable to examine. This uninterrupted flow of diverse creations that steadily nourish the contemporary imaginary of air travel includes Rodrigo Fresán's La parte recordada (2019). In his most recent novel, Fresán strongly expresses the ephemeral condition of the journey, building a character and narrative that are not exhausted by the consumption of movement. The protagonist finally recovers his memory during a flight and resumes the writing of a book that he had never completed. This return to writing, stimulated by the state of being in the clouds, reminds him of the ancient writers who invented stories of gods ruling the world from the clouds, as well as more modern ones who abandoned the project of recounting the immensity of the cosmos. Unable to summarize the transcendence and ineffability of the air and the sky, these authors could only achieve "diluted beginnings and open endings," as in Pink Floyd's song "The Great Gig in the Big [sic] Sky," which Fresán's character resurrects from his memory. He realizes that the need for storytelling derives from the frustration caused by human inability to narrate the immensity of the sky. Thus, once again, the flow of airplanes and the flow of writing merge in fiction, as they have throughout this book.

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans

Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans

Angels: A Modern Myth, trans

La parte recordada. Barcelona: Literatura Random House. Songs Pink Floyd. 1973. The Great Gig in the Sky

IATA-International Air Transport Association