Jonathan Lethem. “Lostronaut.” The New Yorker. Nov. 17 2008

Science fiction, as much as it is an exploration of humanity’s relation to technology, is a genre of nostalgia. The reader, entering an alternative reality, experiences a separation from the known world, this distance then inviting an affirmation of one’s relationship to what is around them. We are encouraged to miss what is actual and present. Lethem’s epistolary short story “Lostronaut” takes the nostalgia that hides itself as an unseen force in most science fiction and brings it to the foreground. A female astronaut, trapped with her fellow crew members in earth orbit by Chinese mines, writes to her boyfriend (lover? husband?). Although what plot the story has is about the experiences on the ship, this mostly provides an occasion and context for the letters, which look back to life on earth, to events ordinary and common as seen from the physical and mental distance of space.

Technology is largely absent from the story; instead the use of letters gives the story a distinctly human presence. From the wonderful first sentence (“Dearest Chase, I am trying to ‘feel’ November, yours and mine”) Lethem makes clear that this is a fiction of sentiment. In fact, the story “feels” pleasingly antiquated. The convenient omission of certain technology (no video links here) marks the story as descendant of the sentimental fiction of the eighteenth century. Where Richardson’s Pamela and the like are concerned with social displacement associated with the rise of capitalism, Lethem seems to be pointing us to a replacement or at least reconsideration of our late capitalism values; particularly he is concerned about the relationship to place. The letters of this displaced astronaut gives us pause to place ourselves in the world.

Is Manhattan beautiful? Have they put up the Christmas tree, or is it too soon? (I know you loathe Rockefeller Center.) Do you ever go to the Chinese garden at the Met, with the tiny gurgling waterfall, where we once went and laid our heads together on a stone and fell asleep?

This passage expresses the lost astronaut’s need to locate herself. We move toward the specific and defined from the vastness of space to Earth to Manhattan to Rockefeller Center and the Met to a single stone. The stone of course is in some way a mark of alienation from nature (it is after all the recreation of a natural setting in the space of a museum); nonetheless it suggests basic desire (need?) humans have to be in place, to belong to the Earth.
The movement toward the Earth and toward being “in place” reverses the direction of locating one’s self that young Stephen Dedalus experiences in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe

[...]What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything after the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all around everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere.

For Joyce the problem is one of living in a world without God, a world without meaning. Lethem’s story looks for a way to put us back in place; to find meaning in our lives here on earth. The story also wants to suggest that technology does not displace us; rather we choose displacement through the technology we bring upon ourselves.