“The Irresistible Fantasy of Sex under Glass” T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts Peter Freese Since the original Biosphere 2 experiment was designed to last for a hundred years (fifty two-year closures) and made it only six months into the second closure before it was abandoned, it seemed irresistible to imagine a second and third fictional closure of this astonishing glassed-in greenhouse of 3.15 acres that housed four men and four women and a suite of 3,800 species of plants and animals. I had the factual material from Biosphere 2 (including a host of press articles, as well as accounts by the Biospherians themselves) for authenticity; all I had to do was create fictional characters and set the wheels in motion for Closure II in order to see what might happen. The biggest problem for the Terranauts/ Biospherians? Growing enough food to keep from starving while at the same time balancing out the oxygen/ carbon dioxide levels. The second biggest? Getting along with one another. (Qtd. in Brady 2016) I’ve written book after book now, not really consciously, but I can see how they’re all allied, about our place on this planet and what it means in terms of the environment. So this is a natural for me. Nature is dying, and so we try to insulate ourselves from it. I write a book like this without any ax to grind or even a point to make. That is all discovered as I go along. It’s like their experiment, to put people, plants and animals under glass and see what happens. ( Qtd. in Swedlund 2016) When, in the fall of 2016, T. C. Boyle published his sixteenth novel, The Terranauts, he presented not only another proof of his unique ability to merge historical facts and fictional inventions into ‘historiographical metafictions,’ but he also revisited some of the topics that had fascinated him from the start of his career. Boyle has often been concerned with closed communities, he has shown an abiding interest in ecological and environmental questions in almost all of his books, and he has always AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0006 Peter Freese 120 been fascinated by such charismatic leaders and egomaniacal gurus as John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville, Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle or Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women and dealt with the - usually dire - effects which their utopian tenets had for their disciples. He confirmed these interests when he recently told an interviewer that he is “quite fascinated by this idea of a small community, especially of a guru telling you what to do and how that might sort itself out.” (Qtd. In Bisely 2016) And he pointed to similarities between The Terranauts and his 2003 fiction finalist for the National Book Award when he explained that his newest novel was “a kind of a return to Drop City. But it’s Drop City under glass.” (Qut. in Spencer 2017) 1. The Critical Reception The critical responses to The Terranauts were mixed, and an unusual share of the many reviewers found faults with the book or even considered it a total failure. In The Washington Post, a disappointed Ron Charles (2016) stated that “how a writer as exciting as Boyle could produce such a dull novel remains a mystery” and complained that “as it drags on for more than 500 pages, The Terranauts inspires a sense of tedium that could only be matched by being trapped in a giant piece of Tupperware.” With regard to the novel’s characters, he criticized that “the adolescent souls in these adult bodies are numbingly petty - and the novel offers no relief from their flat voices, their obvious confessions, their poisonous jealousy.” He regretted that the three narrators “are just as gossipy and small-minded at the beginning as they are at the very distant end of the novel,” and with a reference to the plays which the Terranauts are ordered to perform, he scathingly concluded that “Sartre claimed that ‘Hell is other people,’ but sometimes, Hell is another chapter.” In The Harvard Crimson, Andrew J. Jiang (2016) observed that “while the format has potential to be captivating, its delivery falls short” and found that one reason for that was “that the characters are generally contemptible.” To him, “what we get is a disappointing soap opera, only in the setting of an abstractly different environment,” and he concluded that “The Terranauts disappoints” because its readers are not informed “about captivating biological and natural disasters that the E2 [= ecosphere2] cast must overcome,” but “instead faced with a pregnancy scare and a public image crisis. The book provides an intriguing psychological outlook at the world but it is ultimately not a message worth trudging more than 500 pages to receive.” In the Scottish The National, an anonymous reviewer (Anonymous 2016) found that Boyle’s “satire is surprisingly limp,” that unfortunately he does not “bother to differentiate the voices of the narrators, which is odd, because usually he’s very agile,” and that therefore “after a while T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 121 you start to feel you’re as low on oxygen as the Terranauts.” For him, therefore, “reading The Terranauts is something like being sealed in a ‘biome’: it feels like a big responsibility, nothing much happens, and it is no fun at all. In reality, it would be impossible for these people, such as they are, to care for each other, or for us to care about them. And the novel is exactly the same. As Linda says: ‘They’re fools. Careless, petty, banal people.’” In the Financial Times, Henry Hitchings (2016) granted that “Boyle is a smart observer of human flaws, and there are moments when The Terranauts is a striking portrait of vanity and weakness. Yet while he’s a fluent, often exuberant writer, he’s certainly not an economical one.” And he concluded that “despite all Boyle’s efforts to make the novel seem a spiritually charged experience and a religious allegory, it feels like an upmarket soap opera. There’s too relentless a concern with which of the Terranauts will pair off — and too much sprawling evocation of how and where they might do so.” And in The Times, Melissa Katsoulis (2016) warned that “it is not a good sign when you start […] losing track of characters,” which she took to be the result of “Boyle himself seem[ing] uninterested in half of his cast.” She ironically stated that “in a way, then, this imperfect novel perfectly conveys the human story at the heart of Biosphere 2: get me out of here! ” Although she conceded that “the image of humans enclosed in a glass dome, where anyone can observe their private lives, could be a timely critique of the internet age and reality TV,” she found that “in this surprisingly quotidian telling, the metaphysical plane does not get off the runway. This is not Boyle’s finest hour, but when an author publishes as much as he does, there will be a few duds. As duds go, this could be worse.” In Germany, where Boyle has an enthusiastic audience, the reviews were extremely negative. On the Büchertreff page, a reviewer described The Terranauts as “primitives Big-Brother-Dschungelcamp in Buchform” (primitive Big Brother-Jungle Camp in book form) mostly dealing with “Gemütsschwankungen und den daraus resultierenden Streitereien, welche jedoch eher Kindergartenniveau erreichen. Aja, und Sex. Sex ist das Hauptthema in diesem Roman” (mood swings and the resulting quarrels which, however, rather reach kindergarten level. Yes, and sex. Sex is the main theme in this novel). He or she then described the characters as “von Anfang an Unsympathler und auf einem Niveau pubertierender Teenies” (from the start disagreeable people and on the level of teenies at puberty), called the language “sehr einfach” (very simple) and asked in amazement “wo war hier die hochgepriesene sprachliche Qualität” (where was the much-heralded linguistic quality)? Adding that “die Spannung hält sich mehr als nur in Grenzen, sie ist nämlich gleich gar nicht vorhanden” (the suspense is more than kept in limits, it is namely non-existing), s/ he then once more rejected the book as “eine Mischung aus Big-Brother und Dschungelcamp und auch genauso primitiv und seicht” (a mixture of Big Brother and Jungle Camp and exactly as simple- Peter Freese 122 minded and shallow) (Ambermoon 2014). And in Literatenfunk, Aleks Scholz (2017) began his review with the statement “T. C. Boyle hat eine Seifenoper geschrieben” (T. C. Boyle has written a soap opera). He found all the Terranauts “unsympathisch” (unlikeable), stated that “T. C. Boyle schreibt unfassbar gern über Sex” (T. C. Boyle incredibly likes to write about sex), and ended his damning review by saying about the ecosphere: Das gesamte Buch hindurch atmet sie wie eine große schlafende Schildkröte. Einmal erstickt sie fast und muss reanimiert werden. Aber am Ende erwacht sie und schlägt die Augen auf, ein neuer erdiger Charakter, der die ganzen selbstsüchtigen Idioten in sich trägt. Das ist ein schöner Moment. Und dann könnte das Buch eigentlich endlich anfangen. (Scholz 2017) (Throughout the whole book it breathes like a big sleeping tortoise. In the end it awakes and casts up its eyes, a new earthen character that carries all the selfish idiots in it. That is a beautiful moment. And now the book could finally begin). At the other end of the spectrum, there were also positive voices. Thus, in The New York Times, Jonathan Miles (2016) had reservations with regard to the centrality of sex in the novel, but granted that “Boyle drapes his novel with enough Christian symbolism […] to suggest, or at least nod toward, a pious allegory: the Augustinian notion that libido was what spoiled the Garden of Eden, just as, in a sense, it makes a big hot mess of the E2 mission.” He stated that “humanity, for Boyle, never suffered a fall; we’ve always been this petty and cutthroat and grubby and absurd. And as The Terranauts makes clear, wherever we go - so long as we’re trapped together, in this atmosphere or any other - we always will be.” In Electric Literature, Jake Zucker (2016) found that The Terranauts is “less a closed-room gimmick of narrative limitation and more an absurdist drama that never forgets the reader’s lived experience, either” and that it “makes a delightfully old-fashioned commentary about the soul of men and women: that their tragedies can’t be avoided by changing their environment alone.” He praised Boyle’s “pitch-perfect detail work” and lauded the novel as “a page-turner, and a strong one.” Josh Bryson (2016), the Sleepless Editor, found that “Boyle has created three great characters to drive his story” and concluded that “The Terranauts uses every bit of the novel to draw you in. Boyle’s prose fleshes out every bit of the biosphere and its inhabitants with ease - his three narrators are given just the right amount of space to develop and draw you in. If you’re interested in his work, this is a good jumping-on point, and I can easily recommend you give this book a read.” On National Public Radio, Jason Heller granted that “The Terranauts is eerily timely, despite being set over 20 years ago. Even more resonant is Boyle’s witty yet poignant exploration of our attachment to the chunk of rock we call home - not to mention the walls we let others build around us, and the walls we build around ourselves.” (Heller 2016) In the Star T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 123 Tribune, Jackie Thomas Kennedy (2016) read the novel as an examination of “the limitations of human empathy,” saw the three narrators placed at “the crossroads of megalomania and self-pity,” found Boyle’s prose “gleefully perceptive,” and stated that “the Terranauts challenge themselves to transcend their human appetites, and the struggle is worth our full attention.” And on star2.com, Marc De Faoite found The Terranauts to be “much more than a meditation on ecology and anthropology; it is an entertaining novel with a page-turning storyline that never lets up in pace,” which is “told with a dark humour that balances cynicism and empathy” and “further cements Boyle’s reputation, not only as an extremely prolific writer but also as one of North America’s finest storytellers.” (De Faoite 2017) 2. From John Allen’s Biosphere to T. C. Boyle’s Ecosphere From his first novel onwards, Boyle has located the actions of many of his novels in the interstices of history and fiction and therefore had to make up his mind about how to cope with the relation between the alleged truth of historiography and the freedom of poetic invention. He prefaced his brilliant first novel, Water Music (1982), which deals with the Scottish explorer Mungo Park’s expeditions to Africa, with an ‘Apologia,’ in which he declared that “I have invented language and terminology, I have strayed from and expanded upon my original sources. Where historical fact proved a barrier to the exigencies of invention, I have, with full knowledge and clear conscience, reshaped it to fit my purposes.” (Boyle 1983) And with regard to his fifth novel, The Road to Wellville (1993), which deals with the career of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes, he said in an interview that “my interest is to use history to explore how I feel about things and to communicate that to others - hopefully in an entertaining and edifying and satisfactory way. Where the facts stand in the way of what I’m trying to accomplish, well, the facts will have to be altered.” (Qtd. in Smiley 1993) Since The Terranauts is also built on historical source material, it is necessary to briefly reconstruct the relevant aspects of the ‘real’ story in order to assess the extent of Boyle’s poetic license. Between 1987 and 1991, a company named Space Biosphere Ventures (SBV), with John Allen as inventor and executive chairman, Margret Augustine as CEO, and Marie Harding, Allen’s wife, as vice-president of finance, constructed a huge and daringly innovative building made of steel frames and high-performance glass designed by a former associate of Buckminster Fuller on an area of 40 acres in the high-elevation desert near the small town of Oracle, an hour’s drive north of Tucson, Arizona. This building eventually cost the enormous sum of $150 million, which was provided by SBV’s financial partner, Decisions Investment, owned by Peter Freese 124 the elusive Texas billionaire Ed Bass. The building was meant to be a “biosphere” as conceived of by the Russian mineralogist and biochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (1926) 1 , that is, a scaled-down copy of the earth as an ecological system integrating living beings and their relationships as well as their interaction with the elements. It was christened “Biosphere 2” because it was the second self-sufficient biosphere after the earth itself, and it was meant to test whether one could create an artificial ecosystem that would sustain life in the event of irreparable damage to the earth or make it possible to establish an off-earth colony. During the lengthy planning period, the team constructed seven ‘biomes,’ that is, distinct biological communities of plants and animals that have come into being in response to a shared physical climate, to be located in B2, namely, a rainforest, a savannah grassland, a fog desert, a mangrove wetland and an ocean with a coral reef, as well as an agricultural area and a human habitat. Prospective candidates for B2 were sent on training cruises on the group’s sailing ship Heraclitus, on which they learned about other cultures and how to live in a closed space and did deep sea diving as preparation. Counseled by leading representatives of different disciplines, SBV carefully selected more than 3,800 plant, animal, and insect species from all over the world and put them into B2. Engineers constructed intricate means of heating and cooling the biosphere, which consisted of over fifty miles of pipes and hundreds of motors, pumps, and fans. A complex nerve center was built which would “sound alarms automatically if carbon monoxide, for example, rises to threatening levels. It will turn on fans and air coolers or heaters to prevent the rain forest from ever going above-ninety-five degrees or below fifty-five.” (Allen 1991: 102) Since a power failure would quickly raise the temperature in B2 to uninhabitable extremes and force the inmates to get out as fast as possible, SBV built an Energy Center with three separate generators and also connected it to the local town’s power grid. These facts show that the allegedly self-sufficient wilderness of B2 could not exist without a basement full of machines, and they reveal the major distinction between B1 and B2, namely “just how much support humans unthinkingly receive from the rest of nature on a daily basis.” (Reider 2009: 129) In September 1988, John Allen stayed in a small test module for a first enclosure of three days, a year later Linda Leigh spent twenty-one days in it, while her colleagues watched and analyzed the data, and on September 25, 1991, after a sacred ceremony enacted by Lakota Indian elders, the first team of four men and four women entered B2 with extensive media coverage and a large crowd watching, Timothy Leary, the controversial advocate of psychedelic drugs, among the spectators, and John 1 Reider (2009: 199) reports that “Vernadsky was a patron saint of Biosphere 2; drawings of his white-bearded, studious face graced the office walls at the building site.” - See also the reference in Boyle (2017: 16). T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 125 Allen’s friend William Burroughs, the leading figure of the Beat Generation, sending his best wishes. In the first six months almost 160,000 tourists visited B2 and observed the terranauts through its windows or as monitored by live cameras installed in many places inside. Although the eight biospherians stayed in B2 for the two planned years till September 26, 1993, only two weeks after they had moved in, Jane Poynter, the Domestic Animals Manager, cut her finger while threshing rice and was taken out and brought to a hospital to be operated upon. Only five hours later, she re-entered the biosphere, but since she carried a duffel bag, journalists and spectators started speculating about what might have been in that bag. Boyle himself commented: “It’s a kind of magic, people locked away, life and death. All of that stuff was so fascinating to me as a reader of these accounts. And when they did open it up for the Biospherian who cut her finger, it kind of spoiled it. If they were on Mars, they would have died.” (Qtd. in Swedlund 2016) After this first violation of the complete closure idea, a second, and much more serious one, was caused by the steady rise of the CO 2 level which, as discovered only later, was due to the soil bacteria that sucked oxygen out of the atmosphere and produced carbon dioxide, thus changing the overall chemistry of B2. When after sixteen months the terranauts developed increasing respiratory problems because the oxygen had dropped to 14.5%, which is the equivalent of its availability at an elevation of over 4000 meters, Mission Control decided to break closure and boost the oxygen level with injections from outside, thus once more abandoning the concept of a totally closed system. Another problem was food. The biospherians worked very hard and burned many calories. Although they had numerous plants and several domestic animals in B2 (African pygmy goats, hens, dwarf pigs and tilapia fish which they grew in a rice and azolla pond after an ancient Chinese model), there was never enough to eat. They steadily lost weight, and whereas some wanted extra food to be brought in, others insisted on keeping closure. By the end of the first year, the team was desperate enough to eat the dry grains and beans which they had brought in as seeds for the following mission. With Mission Control insisting on selfsufficiency, the terranauts’ growing hunger caused increasing friction, and soon the results of previous studies in confined environment psychology were confirmed. Before the mission was half over, the team had split into two hostile factions, each including a male-female couple, and they quarreled, among other things, about the interventions of Mission Control. Surprisingly, all members continued to work together because they felt obliged to help achieve the mission’s goals, but otherwise former intimate friends turned into committed enemies, who were barely on speaking terms. On March 6, 1994, a second team, this time with seven members, entered B2, but when suddenly N 2 O, that is, laughing gas, developed, they Peter Freese 126 had to leave only six months after their mission’s start, and the human inhabitation of B2, which had been planned for fifty missions and one hundred years, ended inconspicuously. Meanwhile, running costs had mushroomed and infighting had started between the increasingly nervous heads of the project. John Allen became more and more difficult to deal with, and Margret Augustine’s changed behavior frightened everybody, but Ed Bass, who paid for everything, still remained quiet. By 1993, however, his patience had worn thin and he hired a consulting firm to check on the exploding costs. This firm was led by Steve Bannon, then a Los Angeles investment banker specializing in corporate takeovers, and he tried without success to make the project profitable. Thus, in April 1994, Ed Bass called for an audit. Steve Bannon was made CEO and, with the second team still inside B2, the members of SBV signed an agreement which resulted in the dissolving of their company, with Ed Bass keeping the biosphere and most of the other assets. In November 1995, Columbia University, New York, took over B2 until 2003 as a laboratory for their Earth Institute, an interdisciplinary center for environmental research. After that, for some time the biosphere was in danger of being demolished, but in 2007 the University of Arizona acquired it for research and teaching purposes. The ongoing change in the public assessment of the B2 experiment is most clearly illustrated by the fact that in 1987, when work began, the popular science magazine Discover enthusiastically praised Biosphere 2 as “the most exciting venture to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon,” but that in 1999, five years after SBV was dissolved, Time retrospectively discounted Biosphere 2 as one of the “50 Worst Ideas of the Twentieth Century.” (Both qtd. in Reider 2009: 3) 3. Science and the Human Experiment Boyle says on his homepage that “in [his] telling, [he] project[s] a full two-year second closure, in which the characters who inhabit the fictional Ecosphere II are determined at all costs - even to the point of death - to avoid the mistakes of the first crew, most particularly the breaking of closure.” He asks “Is it possible to replicate the environment of Ecosphere I, i.e., the earth we all inhabit? Maybe so. But what of the emotions, interactions, loves and hates and jealousies of the people locked inside? ” And he adds that he has “chosen two epigraphs by way of reflecting on that question.” 2 These epigraphs are Margaret Mead’s optimistic observation “Never doubt that a small group of committed, thoughtful people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” and Jean Paul Sartre’s skeptical statement that “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (Hell is 2 See T. C. Boyle’s homepage; https: / / www.tcboyle.com/ page2.html? 2. T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 127 other people). Together these quotations delimit the range of results which the E2 experiment could have. The Terranauts, then, is a fictitious continuation of the Biosphere project that makes use of the authentic material. Boyle himself confirms his procedure by stating in his ‘Author’s Note’ that he studied John Allen’s illustrated book Biosphere 2: The Human Experiment, the accounts which the biospherians Abigail Ailing and Mark Nelson published in Life Under Glass and Jane Poynter delivered in The Human Experiment, and the excellent documentation of the project’s complicated history which Rebecca Reider presented in her Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities. Even a cursory collation of these books with the novel shows that Boyle took over most of the major facts as well as several smaller details, but that he allowed himself full poetic license with certain other aspects such as, for example, his depiction of Jeremiah Reed, Judy Forester, and Darren Iverson as his fictional equivalents of the historical figures of John Allen, Margret Augustine, and Ed Bass respectively. The Biosphere project was a scientific venture that daringly attempted to make ecologists and engineers cooperate despite their different aims and methods and that faced a host of new, highly complex, and hitherto untackled problems. To fully understand these problems one needs to be familiar with the concerns of disciplines ranging from eco-biology and climatology through botanics and bacteriology to machine and electrical engineering, and it is obvious that such crucial problems as the medical effects of what Roy Walford, the first team’s Medical Officer, sarcastically dubbed the biospherians’ “healthy starvation diet” (qtd. in Reider 2009: 157) which troubled them throughout their mission, or the unexpected production of carbon dioxide by soil bacteria, which almost killed them through lack of oxygen, are hardly appropriate material for a novel or, as Melissa Katsoulis (2016) put it, “you can’t make a cracking adventure story out of blood-oxygen levels and soil acidity regulation.” It is no accident that John Allen’s book Biosphere 2 is subtitled The Human Experiment and that Jane Poynter also titled the account of her experience as the first mission’s Domestic Animals Manager The Human Experiment. When Allen and Poynter talk about the ‘human experiment’ they mean experiments both by and with humans, and the fact that Boyle is fully aware of this double meaning becomes clear when he has Dawn, one of his narrators, muse about the motley content of the seven biomes in E2. She points out that “purists criticized us for creating an artificial environment stocked with species of plants and animals that normally wouldn’t come into contact with one another, but outside the glass we’re all living in what scientists have begun calling the Anthropocene Age, dominated by man, which has defined itself by doing just that.” (322) Here she uses - somewhat anachronistically - a term which the Dutch Nobel-Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined as late as 2000 and which suggests a Peter Freese 128 name for a new and distinct geological age during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the earth. 3 Dawn then says: What people didn’t realize was that the special gift of E2 was in presenting a possible world with an eye toward tweaking it over the course of a century to create an ideal one. The whole idea behind species packing is to see which ones will find that niche and survive and how they’ll contribute to the whole - at the end of a century we’ll see genetic variation that makes E2’s biota unique from anything else on earth. And, of course, beyond earth - because from the outset, in G.C.’s vision, the big question was could we create an independent self-generating ecosphere to take us into space (or in the worst-case scenario, sustain life on this planet in the face of a systemic worldwide collapse). (323) In this context, the term ‘human experiment’ refers primarily to manmade scientific experiments, and Boyle has Dawn use the term in that sense when she says that eventually most of the crew members came to understand her child’s “value to the mission. In a sense, she was the human experiment.” (415). But the generic conventions of fiction unfortunately motivated Boyle to foreground the ‘human interest’ aspect in his novel, and consequently his tale deals mostly with those aspects which average readers find alluring because they provide the ‘human’ details about the persons involved. It was these very details in which also the thousands of tourists that flocked to B2 showed the greatest interest. This was confirmed by an Arizona newspaper writer who observed in 1992 that “visitors seem most interested in finding out why anybody would volunteer to be sealed away for 24 months, and what exactly are the sleeping arrangements.” (Ropp 1992) And in his book on the scientific implications of B2 John Allen himself unwillingly pointed to what stood in the center of public attention when he said that the hottest topic of interest for the news media, and a subject for amused conjecture for the Biosphere 2 watchers, are the love lives of the crew once the doors have closed. Four men, four women. None of them married to one another. Scientific inquiry may be their primary objective here, but it’s hard to imagine that eight healthy adults will put romance and sex on hold for the entire two years. Curt Suplee of the Washington Post put it thus: “Will there be sex in the Biosphere? Of course, but who cares … those bidding for a berth in Biosphere 2 are in it for the love of the idea, not the colleague down the hall.” (Allen (1991: 130) It was Boyle’s focus on the salacious topic of “sex in the Biosphere” that earned him some reviewers’ unfriendly comparison of his novel with a disreputable television show. Janice Pariat spoke about the readers’ “dis- 3 For details see Steffen/ Grinevald/ Crutzen/ McNeill (2011). T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 129 concerting sense that the project resembles a cheap thrills, drama-ridden reality-TV show. An ecologically driven ‘Big Brother’ watched hungrily by the media and the public (the question topmost on everyone’s mind being, when are they going to have sex? And with whom? ).” (Pariat 2017) A reviewer of bookmunch observed that “sex is the stuff of life and if life is to prosper under glass it has to embrace pretty much every aspect of it. And that is what The Terranauts does. Imagine this as a primitive Big Brother […] and like in Big Brother, the inmates have their ups and their downs.” (Anonymous 2017) And a German reviewer indignantly rejected the novel as ‘a mixture of Big Brother and Jungle Camp and exactly as primitive and shallow.’ (Ambermoon 2017) In the TV show Big Brother, which was first broadcast in 1999 by a commercial channel in the Netherlands and soon became an international franchise, several contestants are made to live together in an isolated house, and their interaction is continually monitored by live cameras and personal audio microphones. One after the other is voted out until only one remains and wins the prize. This show, whose name refers to the oppressive surveillance described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, provides television viewers with the voyeuristic pleasure of observing the group-dynamic processes going on among locked-up people, and since it exploits a constellation similar to that of the biospherians with regard to both Mission Control and the visitors at the windows, the critics’ analogy is not surprising. However, there exists not only a parallel between Big Brother and the Biosphere but also a historical influence. Marc De Faoite (2017) pointed out that B2 “was a huge media sensation at the time, and apparently the inspiration for Big Brother, allegedly the very first reality TV show.” And Jonathan Miles (2016) confirmed that since the Biosphere project was “the acknowledged inspiration for the original Dutch version of ‘Big Brother,’ which triggered a seismic shift in television programming following its 1999 debut, it’s fair to call it the genesis of reality TV.” Boyle certainly did not like the transfer of the comparison between the Biosphere project and the Big Brother show to his novel, and when Amy Brady asked him: “I couldn’t help but think of reality T.V. culture as I read The Terranauts. The media’s obsession with the Terranauts’ hook ups, the gossip, the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ - Ecosphere 2 is practically the new Big Brother house! Did you watch reality T.V. while writing this book? ” he answered: The original experiment was from 1991-1993 and my fictional second closure is from 1993-1995, long before reality TV became a (sad) reality in our depleted culture, and yet here were my Terranauts, on camera 24/ 7 and overseen by a Mission Control that was in fact so controlling it presented me with haunting echoes of Orwell’s Big Brother. However, I did not take my inspiration from TV (I have zero interest in reality TV; I have great inner resources Peter Freese 130 with regard to free time - for instance, I know how to read). (Qtd. Brady 2016) 4. The Structure of the Novel and the Narrative Perspective The novel’s overall structure mirrors the unfolding of its action by being divided into four main parts: “Pre-Closure” (1-77) deals with the Terranauts’ preparations up to the moment they enter the ecosphere and it is closed; “Closure: Year One” (78-268) and “Closure: Year Two” (269-455) deal with the two years the Terranauts spend in their artificial sphere; and “Reentry” (456-508) deals with their return to the world. This symmetrical structure, in which the two-year closure is framed by the preparation for and the outcome of the experiment, signals that the novel presents a complete action that unfolds mostly chronologically from its beginning to its end. But readers have to learn that the outcome is not only rather unexpected but that the novel’s ending also remains irritatingly open. As far as the narrative perspective is concerned, Boyle departs from his usual procedure, namely, the employment of an effaced and omniscient narrator who alternately looks at the world through the eyes of different characters. Instead, he makes use of three protagonist-narrators who take turns telling about how they have experienced their participation in “the ecology of closed systems” (28). Since two of them are members of the crew, whereas the third is not selected and has to stay behind, Boyle’s choice of narrators allows him to alternate between inside and outside points of view. He himself commented on the advantages of such a constellation by saying: These people passionately believe in this project and want more than anything to get into it. But what happens when you’re not chosen? That’s something that struck me right from the beginning. Once we have Linda excluded, we also have a way of getting out of this hermetic world. So we have an outside point of view from Mission Control, Big Brother, and we have also the internal conflicts and joys of living communally under glass. (Qtd. in Swedlund 2016) The three protagonist-narrators are Dawn Chapman, Ramsay Roothoorp, and Linda Ryu. Dawn Chapman is a good-looking woman of twenty-nine years with a degree in “environmental studies” (9). Her crew nickname is E. which is short for Eos, the goddess of dawn, and in E2 she holds the position of “MDA, Manager of Domestic Animals” (7). Ramsay Roothoorp is an inveterate womanizer of thirty-six years and a “lit major” (111). His nickname is Vodge, which is short for “Vajra, the thunderbolt that Indra, Indian god of rain and thunderstorms, hurls down at the earth” (48), and in E2 he holds the positions of Communications Officer and Water Sys- T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 131 tems Manager. To understand why Boyle gave Ramsay this uncommon nickname, one needs to know that in the years before B2 the real biospherians built a brick hotel in Kathmandu, which they called the Hotel Vajra, taking the name from “the Sanskrit word for ‘thunderbolt,’ the Tibetan Buddhist symbol of the power of the enlightened mind.” (Reider 2009: 50) The third protagonist-narrator is the Korean-American Linda Ryu, a disgruntled woman of thirty-two years who has “only a B.S. in animal sciences” (7) and whose name might well refer to the verb ‘to rue.’ She is “not really all that pretty” (7), and her nickname, which she hates, is Dragon Lady, later shortened to Dragon and then changed into Komodo. 4 She feels she has been rejected because she is “Asian” (8), and she serves throughout as the voice of disappointment, jealousy and even hatred. In the first part of the novel, Dawn, Ramsay and Linda present one chapter each, in the second part, their sequence is unaltered but now each has his or her say three times. In the third part, each gets even four chances to present their views of the events, and in the last and shortest part each is again limited to one chapter. Altogether, then, each narrator is in charge of nine of the novel’s twenty-seven chapters. From Huckleberry Finn’s “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter” (Clemens 1962: 17) to Holden Caulfield’s “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born” (Salinger 1951: 3), confessional I-narration in vernacular language and with direct addresses that create immediacy and transform the readers of a written into the listeners of an oral text, has served as a genuinely American form of presentation. In The Terranauts, Boyle uses this strategy to enhance his narrators’ reliability and make them establish close contact with their readers. Thus, Dawn punctuates her narration with phrases like “you probably don’t know this” (4), “forgive me for saying this” (7), “just think about it” (8), or “but let me explain” (12). Ramsay addresses his audience even more frequently with statements like “and you know what? ” (33), “believe me” (39), “as you might expect” (44), “but let me back up here a minute” (46), “at the risk of trying your patience” (55), “forgive me” (55), or “but you know what I mean” (55). And Linda uses the same strategy when she says “I want to tell you” (58), “let me tell you” (58, 73), “just let me say” (59), “I don’t have to tell you” (60), “do I sound bitter? ” (64) or “believe me” (66). All of these and dozens of other questions, interpolations, exclamations and affirmations create the atmosphere of an ongoing conversation, and it 4 The “Dragon Lady” was introduced in 1935 by Milton Caniff in his comic strip Terry and the Pirates, embodying the stereotype of Asian women as strong and mysterious. - Ramsay explains that the Terranauts realized that this was “faintly racist” and therefore they “settled on Komodo, as in Komodo dragon, the big deadly lizard of the Indonesian archipelago” (48). Peter Freese 132 comes as an irritating surprise when later statements like Dawn’s “it doesn’t go beyond this page” (212) or Ramsay’s “there probably aren’t many people reading this who don’t know what came next” (476) and this is “why I’ve written this account in the first place” (476) correct the illusion that the three narrators’ stories are immediate oral reports and imply instead that, despite their colloquial language, they are written and, one has to infer, well-considered reports. The decisive narratological aspect of a story told by an I-asprotagonist is the temporal distance between the experiencing I and the narrating I, because it is this distance which signals the narrator’s development and his or her maturation as brought about by the quasi autotherapeutic act of giving order and meaning to an experience by telling about it. Boyle inserts passing remarks which signal that all three narrators tell their stories retrospectively, and sometimes these signals are rather difficult to recognize. Thus, Dawn mentions that during her trip with Linda to Tucson, “the radio was playing a tune by a singer who would kill himself a month after closure” (23), she says that “the lyric” (23) of his song was “Here we are now, entertain us” (23), and she adds that “the singer droned, soon to be dead, though he didn’t know it yet - or maybe he did.” (23) Since closure takes place in March 1994, the singer referred to must have died in April of that year. If one can identify the line quoted by Dawn as coming from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana with Kurt Cobain as lead singer, and if one remembers that he committed suicide on April 5, 1994, then her cryptic reference proves that she tells retrospectively. But when she adds that what her best friend Linda wanted, “she wasn’t going to get. Not now - and I think I knew it even then - and not years from now either” (24), her “I think I knew” irritatingly relativizes the time of her telling. Later, however, Dawn’s several remarks about the limitations of her memory - “If I remember rightly” (216) or “I don’t really remember” (217) - and her passing references to “a kind of bitterness none of us could have imagined at the outset” (86) or to the fact that a particular hoot “was to become our team anthem” (89) clearly show that she tells from a point in time which allows her to look back upon her two years in E2. She confirms that when she says about her marriage in the ecosphere that Ramsay looked “as if this was all a big joke, which, in retrospect, I suppose it was” (379). And her remark that “in the aftermath, people said I was too hard-core” (469) with regard to her decision to stay in E2 for another mission implies that her telling must even take place after March 1996. Ramsay also punctuates his story with hints like “of course I didn’t know then what I know now” (35) or that thoughts about what he had done to Dawn “really didn’t cross my mind, or not yet anyway” (290), and he, too, uses the revealing term when he says that the sudden rise in temperature did not bother him “except in retrospect” (186). The only narrator who does not emphasize the retrospective nature of her narration is Linda, who uses T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 133 the phrase “as best I remember” (195) only once when she tries to date a specific event. One problem with Boyle’s protagonist-narrators is that their equally colloquial, sometimes even slangy and, with regard to sexual matters, rather blunt voices sound very much alike. The artistic wordplay that distinguishes other Boyle novels is greatly reduced and, if it occurs at all, not reserved to one narrator. Thus, Dawn puns that Diana Kesselring’s nickname is Meadowlark or just Lark but that her job as crew captain is “anything but a lark” (83). When Linda talks to a reporter hoping for an affair, but then realizes that he only wants to sound her out on Dawn, she equivocates: “and it dawns on me - Dawns - just what’s going on here” (395). When she buys a Canon Eos camera to make photos of Ramsay and Judy, she points out that this camera is especially appropriate because it has “Dawn’s crew moniker stamped right on the face of it” (500). And when she arranges for Dawn to meet her at the window, she waits for her far into the night, and ends the novel by ambiguously stating: “The night deepens, deepens again, but Dawn never comes.” (508) Unusual comparisons can also be found in the reports of all three narrators. Thus, Linda compares the wildly dancing G.C. to “ouroboros swallowing his own tail over and over again” (199), observes that putting one’s faith in Judy is “like trusting a rattlesnake not to bite you the second time you swing open the door to toss a rat in its cage” (445), and compares clouds to “whipped cream on top of a root beer float” (447) and a stand of saguaro cacti to “a troop of people getting held up by a gunman” (500). Ramsay says about his team-mate Gyro’s uncoordinated dancing that “he looked like a pole vaulter coming down hard over and over again” (347). When he oversees Dawn’s striptease for her boyfriend at the window, he sees the latter’s figure “looming in and out of the weak sepia light like a big fluttering vampire bat in one of the Dracula movies” (108). And when he talks to Mission Control on the phone, he hears the operator’s voice at the other end as “thin and slippery, Vaseline on a wet branch” (339) and Judy’s voice “like the blade of a stiletto extracted from a block of ice” (339). When Dawn speaks about Ramsay’s shocked reaction to her telling him that her birth is due, she describes him as with “one hand snatching at the air as if he were on a crowded bus and fumbling for a strap to hang on to” (410), and an early reaction of hers to Linda she calls “no more than a fluctuation in the flight I was on, the first stage of the rocket falling away while the payload hurtles higher and ever higher” (17). All three narrators are also, if only rarely, capable of lyrical intensity. Thus, Ramsay describes his team-mate Gretchen’s soft crying as “a sound like rain in the gutters on a night when you never suspected a storm was brewing.” (244) or says about his barefoot walk through the ocean biome that his “toes read the soft trucked-in earth like braille” (124). Dawn describes “a February morning in the high desert, everything in bloom with the winter rains and the light spread like a soft film over the spine Peter Freese 134 of the mountains” (4) or talks about “the black vacancy of the desert and the star-strewn sky that drew down like a curtain to meet it” (171). And Linda refers to somebody’s eyes as “hazel, with the minute hand of a tiny golden clock in the iris of the one nearest me” (395). With certain exceptions, then, as for example Ramsay’s preposterous macho references to “the bachelor king’s erotic fantasy obliterated by a dramatic display of prosimian territoriality” (183) or his “shallow go-straight-for-the-target brand of inveterate male obliviousness” (247), the three narrators’ voices are widely interchangeable, and the reviewer of The National was right when he deplored that Boyle does not “bother to differentiate the voices of the narrators, which is odd, because usually he’s very agile.” (Anonymous 2016) This, however, is not the only problem, and Ron Charles (2016) correctly pointed out that all three of Boyle’s protagonist-narrators do not seem to have really matured during the two-year course of the mission and deplored that “Dawn, Linda and Ramsay are just as gossipy and small-minded at the beginning as they are at the very distant end of the novel.” Obviously, this weakness has to do with the fact that Boyle puts the Terranauts’ sex life in the center of his novel. 5. “The Irresistible Fantasy of Sex under Glass” In her opening chapter in the “Pre-Closure” section, Dawn tells about how in her final interview she is asked whether she is on the pill and has a love affair, and that alerts readers at the very beginning to the fact that Mission Control foresees sexual activities in E2 and tries to prevent pregnancies. In his initial chapter, Ramsay muses about his constant interest in sex, admits that he has “always been quick to arousal” (54), describes his secret affair with Judy, refers to his relationship with Rhonda Ronson, imagines that once inside E2 he “could fuck” (41) all four women on the team, and tells about his last intercourse with Judy in the public restroom a few hours before closure, thus devoting practically all of his opening statement to his sexual needs and exploits. And in her first chapter, Linda talks about her desperation about being rejected, her drinking habit, and her disappointing affair with Dennis who was only “going for a random fuck or two,” but was “pretty much a zero in bed” (63) so that she “would have been better off masturbating” (64), and then speaks about her hatred of Ramsay and her view of Dawn’s lover Johnny as “a jerk” (68). Thus, sexual activities constitute the center of all three protagonistnarrators’ lives, and this does not change at all after they have entered the ecosphere. In the “Closure: Year One” section, right after having entered E2, Dawn recalls in great detail her last lovemaking with Johnny and then muses about the “primitive” way in which a woman like her “responded T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 135 reflexively to a deep male voice, as if it were a rutting call” (93). By the end of the first week, she performs a striptease for Johnny at the visitors’ window. Ramsay tells that he was sexually aroused by observing Dawn’s performance, talks at length about “the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass” (109), relates his urges to Adam and Eve procreating and grants them ‘scientific’ dignity by claiming that “in the worlds we were projecting, sex and genetic diversity were key, for our species and all the others too” (109). When the jealous Judy criticizes him for playing in the mud with Dawn, he admits that he acted “like some hormone-challenged teenager” (114). Being constantly aroused, he experiences E2 as “a hormonal accelerator […] a kind of perpetual steamy night of the adolescent soul” (123), and in a sleepless night he helps Gretchen Frost, the Manager of Wilderness Biomes, who is four years older than he and “unstylish, unhip, frumpy” (119), to rescue a wounded galago and then sleeps with her. The next day he talks to Judy on the phone about sex and declares that he is “more a doer than a talker when it came to sex” (130). Meanwhile, Linda overhears a phone conversation between Ramsay and Judy, learns about their secret affair, and decides to use her knowledge “to [her] advantage” (133). Dawn’s lover Johnny visits Linda and they sleep with each other. Talking to Dawn, who confesses that she still loves Johnny, Linda lies to her and muses: “On some level I’ve slept with him for her, though I couldn’t tell her that, because on another level I’d done it because of her, to spite her, to get some of my own back in a relationship that was all one-way now.” (147) Later, Tom Cook aka Gyro, the Technosphere Supervisor, walks out into the rain forest where he lies down and masturbates. This is monitored by one of the omnipresent cameras, and the people at Mission Control argue about whether it is what Judy calls “anomalous behavior” (147) or just a reaction to a normal need. In June, Dawn confesses that she does not take the pill and insists that also scientists have sexual needs. She talks about her physical by Richard Lack, the Medical Officer, and his praise of her as “a perfect physical specimen. A paragon” (159). She finds Gyro’s masturbation natural - “He had his urges, just like anybody else” (166) - and is aroused by thinking about it. Ramsay is aware that he should “never have started in with Gretchen” (177) since the affair has turned into “a full-on disaster” (178). On the Fourth of July, the Terranauts have a beach party and swim naked. Ramsay is lusting after Dawn and, while he tries to hide his erection, he is pursued by lovelorn Gretchen. Linda is relieved that Johnny has not told Dawn about their intercourse and learns from Gretchen about her aborted affair with Ramsay. She promises Gretchen to keep it a secret but then tells Johnny about it. Dawn is asked by G.C. to be kind to Gyro. When she is, Gyro prompty falls in love with her, but she rejects him and insists that “I wasn’t going to sleep with anybody for any reason other than mutual desire and love” (215). Thus, when he comes to her room and presents her with “a package of peanut M&M’s” (217) which he has Peter Freese 136 smuggled into E2, he only gets some French kissing. Dawn tells Linda about it, who states that “you’ve got to have something more than just, what, playing with yourself? I mean, for your own sanity.” (219) Dawn tells Linda that even Richard made a pass at her, touching her breasts and telling her “how important, how vital, an active sex life is to good health” (221). Gretchen gets slowly back to normal, but Dawn cannot “help defending” (223) Ramsay, who flirts with her and as a Christmas present gives her a piece of sugarcane with a note that she should come to his room to get more. He recalls his tryst with Gretchen, the embarrassing way she pursued him and even wanted to marry him, and how brutally he rejected her, and he reflects about “the detours with Judy, which [Dawn] didn’t know about, and Gretchen, which she did” (248). When he says “I’m a temporizer, a diplomat, a talker - above all, a talker” (251), he contradicts his earlier statement that he is “more a doer than a talker when it came to sex” (130) and thus again confirms that he has no principles. When the drunken Dawn comes to his room, he presents her with a spliff of cannabis indica, they kiss, and - his tale ends. But then Linda reports that Dawn told her “she had sex with Ramsay” (256), the man whom Linda considers “the one shitheel any woman with any sense would have steered clear of” (256). She is “jealous” (257) and reveals that in their talk Dawn has defended Ramsay and argued that she needed sex. By February, Linda goes to a bar every night to get drunk and, two days before the celebration of the first year of closure, finds out that Johnny, Dawn’s former lover, is now together with Rhonda Ronson, who once dated Ramsay. Dawn no longer cares about either and confides to Linda that she has been missing her period for two months. In the “Closure: Year Two” section, Dawn consults medical handbooks and explains her missing periods as “hypothalamic amenorrhea” (272), lack of menstruation due to malnourishment. She and Ramsay try to hide their affair, although they rightly assume that meanwhile all the others know about it. Gyro again visits Dawn to profess his love and calls Ramsay “a cheat” (276). Dawn, who now knows for sure that she is “in love” (282) with Ramsay, realizes that “getting pregnant, knocked up, would be the end of everything we’d worked for” (280). When she feels certain that she is pregnant, she informs Ramsay, who is “infuriating, hurtful, acting like a shit” (284) and puts the blame solely on her. Richard notes that something is wrong and asks Dawn to see him. Ramsay feels that Dawn betrayed him by not taking the pill and refuses to bring another child into an overpopulated world. But he still loves her and soon regrets his behavior. They meet for a secret talk, in which Dawn tells him that Richard has confirmed her pregnancy. Ramsay admits his lack of “empathy” (294) and demands an abortion. When he says that to Richard, the latter tells him that he is “not even human. Untermensch -” (298). In another talk with Dawn, Ramsay apologizes and promises to stand by her, but then he talks to Judy and is aroused by her high heels. When Linda hears from T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 137 Dawn that she missed her period, she expects that Dawn will have to break closure and she will get the chance to replace her. She drinks too much and her attempts to begin an affair with Gavin Helgeland fail. When Dawn rejects her advice to accept an abortion, Linda reveals her friend’s pregnancy to Judy. In mid-April, Judy tells Dawn that she knows about her pregnancy, that they will not break closure, and that it has to be either an abortion or a birth inside E2. Dawn realizes that Linda must have betrayed her to Judy, informs her teammates about her pregnancy, and receives nasty reactions (328). When Johnny comes to the window and asks Dawn about meeting again after leaving E2, she says no. Mission control sends in a pamphlet about abortion, but Dawn knows she will not allow it: “This was my baby. This was my body. And nobody was going to tell me what to do with it.” (335) Observing how nastily Dawn is treated by the others, Ramsay stands up for her but insists on “the mission über alles” (336). He talks to G.C. himself, who says that an abortion done by Richard is the only solution. Ramsay hesitates, and thus “nothing’s settled” (344). Then Ramsay has “the first inkling of the notion that would redeem the whole mission” (349), which hits him when Dawn says “You’re the father, aren’t you? - Well, act like it.” (349) Linda is furious with Dawn, because her chances of taking her place are dwindling. Coming back from a failed vacation in Mexico, she learns from Gavin that Dawn is “going to have the baby” (357) and “she’s having it inside” (359). Judy informs her that Ramsay “schemed all this up” (359) and asks her to talk Dawn out of it. Linda talks with Dawn, who accuses her of having disclosed her secret to Judy and informs her that she is “getting married” (365) and that G.C. has suggested to Ramsay that he propose to her. He does, and it is “romantic” (366). She tells about the ceremony and that G.C. himself came to the window to talk to them about Ramsay’s plan to “milk the whole thing for its PR value” (368). Linda, speaking for Judy, still tries to talk Dawn out of it, but finally they tell each other the truth. Dawn realizes that Linda only wants her out in order to replace her and tells her to “screw yourself” (374). Dawn and Ramsay are married in a ceremony that is broadcast nationwide. Ramsay reports that the wedding “precipitated a whole shitstorm of intramural friction” (381) and that “the rest of the crew was almost hysterically resentful” (381). His erotic excitement is gone and he is not “prepared to be a father” (382). A talk at the window with Judy, who wears no panties and spreads her legs for him, makes him confess that “I was an incarcerated sex fiend” (384). Afterwards he has disappointing sex with his wife. In mid-June, Dawn’s pregnancy is officially announced, and the news about “the first child born off-earth in the history of humankind” (386) is a big success. Ramsay’s main aim is still to keep closure. In E2, resentment grows because “we were no longer selling team solidarity so much as the miracle of generation under glass” (389), and it comes to a bitter confrontation between Dawn and Gretchen. Linda Peter Freese 138 now knows that she will not replace Dawn and is “pissed” (393). Since also her failed attempt to get closer to Gavin makes her drink too much, she is on the verge of badmouthing Dawn when Johnny appears and saves her from making that mistake. Gavin, who is closer to Dawn than to Linda, takes Dawn to the window to talk to Linda, and they become somewhat reconciled. Meanwhile, in E2 “the food thefts begin in earnest” (403) because pregnant Dawn needs more calories and all team members are constantly hungry. Dawn reports that “the ninth month was probably the worst” (407) but will not let her crewmates down. “On September 20, 1995” (412), her daughter is born and christened Eve. Ramsay cannot stand to attend the birth. When the child is shown at the window, Dawn feels that “we were pioneers of a new world and a new way of thinking” (413), and Ramsay says in an interview that if the child had been a boy it would have been called Adam. Most of the crewmates eventually come to see Eve’s value to the mission. Dawn carries her around in a papoose, and “within a week” is “back to [her] normal duties” (416). With food becoming scarcer and Dawn needing an extra portion, the others are increasingly disgruntled. At a meal Gretchen attacks Dawn, a row starts, and Ramsay is beaten up by his team-mate Troy. He cannot establish empathy with his daughter, who to him is “an excrescence, an irritation” (423). He reports that by November “nobody was getting enough to eat and everybody was getting on everybody’s nerves” (426). After the team barely survives a dangerous decline of the O 2 -level, Ramsay, “a celebrity now, a kind of eco-saint” (440), thinks about how to earn money for his family in the future. When he broaches that subject to Dawn, she coolly states: “I’m not going anywhere” (443). Linda reports that she has been selected for the next mission and is certain to become “a model Terranaut” (446). When she talks to Dawn at the window, the latter says “I’ve got something to tell you.” (455) In the “Reentry” section, Dawn reports that she is met with disbelief when she announces that she will stay in E2. Even Ramsay is against it, and the Terranauts take a vote which comes out 7: 1 against her. She realizes that “if I stayed inside, Linda was the odd one out” (465). She talks to G.C. about the “practicality, continuity and, most of all, publicity” (467) of her decision, and he asks her to bring in Ramsay, who needs time to think about it. They decide that she will stay inside, Ramsay will come out for two hours and then go back in, and they will announce their plan at the time of reentry. Dawn will “break the record for the most consecutive days anyone had ever spent in an enclosed self-sustaining system” (470), and she knows “what a sacrifice [Ramsay] was making” (470). Stepping out of E2, Ramsay is enchanted by the open world, especially the women in heels. G.C. publicly announces their plan, and Ramsay explains that “we were going to have generational continuity between the missions” (475). For him this is “the single defining moment of all of T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 139 our lives” (477), but “did I give even a glancing thought to my wife and daughter? No, I didn’t.” (477) He eats and drinks too much, has a charged talk with Judy, whom he still finds attractive, and is suddenly certain that he will not go back in. Shucking his team overalls and looking “like somebody who had no principles, who had never had any principles, who was driven by the raw impulses of the id” (480), he runs in his underwear out into the desert where he falls asleep in “the greatest crisis of [his] adult life” (481). Linda and two of the new crew members find him outside the airlock and bring him to G.C., whom he tells that it is all Dawn’s fault. Since, not to endanger the project, his failure must be hushed up, and they pretend he had an accident and make him hobble around in a cast. Because he knows enough to blackmail the organization, he is promised a job and a salary. He piously talks about Dawn and “what I’d done to her, the guilt of it that tore me awake in the morning and wouldn’t let me sleep at night” (487), and about his growing love for his daughter. After two weeks he goes to the window to talk to his wife, who now is “the shining star of the whole enterprise” (490), but they have nothing to say to each other. Once more rejected, Linda goes through “the worst humiliation of [her] life” (495) and refuses to speak to Dawn. She is given a check, a contract as Executive Vice President, and a guarantee to be MDA for the next mission. She accepts and, “heartbroken” and “defeated” (497), starts “plotting [her] revenge” (496). Her only aim is “to bring them all down, one by one, and climb right up on the ladder to occupy the space they vacate” (499). She buys a camera, and in early April waits at a motel to catch Ramsay and Judy after she has detected some suspicious emails. She secretly photographs them and now possesses incriminating pictures. She arranges a meeting with Dawn at the window, wanting to show her proof of Ramsay’s betrayal, but Dawn never comes. Of course, Boyle carefully researched novel contains a number of passages that deal with such specific E2-topics as the detailed and knowledgeable description of the ecosphere and the daily work of the Terranauts with the domestic animals, the numerous plants in the five biomes, and the complicated machinery, the importance of their shared meals and the consequences of their steadily growing hunger, the enmity between individual members and the gradual disintegration of the team into two hostile factions, the problems caused by Mission Control’s unceasing surveillance and interference, the unexpected drama of the fight between the galagos, 5 a threatening electricity shortage, the near fatal decline of the 5 Here, too, Boyle closely follows his sources. Reider (2019: 162) reports that B2 contained “playful little African primates called galagos, commonly known as ‘bush babies’” (78), that there were four of them, namely “Topaz, Opal, Oxide, and William Kim, the Biosphere’s little tree-dwelling primates, who became like the biospherians’ pets” (146), and that they “did not fare much better than their fellow primates, the humans; two baby galagos were born inside Biosphere 2, but two of Peter Freese 140 O 2 -level, and many others. But the preceding summary clearly shows that Boyle focusses on the complicated love life of his three protagonistnarrators and that about half of the eight Terranauts do not acquire an individual status and remain shadowy figures in the background. Dawn’s, Ramsay’s and Linda’s foibles and shortcomings, their impulsive actions and petty squabbles, their rather immature bondings and separations, their disappointments and delusions, their veiled resentments and poisonous jealousy dominate the novel and make it into a sequence of silly intrigues or, in the eyes of several critics, an “ecological soap opera.” 6 Michelle (2016) and Andrew J. Jiang (2016) might have been too harsh when they respectively decreed that “the three narrators are thoroughly unlikable. Each expresses a sense of self-righteousness that is meant to be a defense of their actions but turns out to be an indication of the egos at work” and that “the characters are generally contemptible [and] share something in common: unlikeability.” But it is true that all three protagonist-narrators possess a high degree of self-righteousness that borders on narcissism and often display an adolescent pettiness. The driving force behind their actions is sex, and Clark Spencer (2017) rightly observed that “though the experiment is scientific in nature, the crew members in Boyle’s book come off more like college freshmen than serious-minded graduate students.” Dawn, the all-American cheerleader-type, is an affable and telegenic naïf who coolly acts out her sexual wants. Ramsay, the always randy Lothario figure, is fixated on his fantasy of ‘sex under glass.’ And Linda, the backstabbing Korean-American who considers herself a victim of racism and sexism, not only plans revenge but also searches for sexual satisfaction. Jonathan Miles confirmed such an estimate when he said: Ramsay, for instance, is fixated on mostly one thing: “the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass.” From the novel’s opening scenes, when Dawn’s final interview with the project’s management begins and ends with questions about her sex life, this is Boyle’s fixation too - the erotic potential of men and women thrown together in a locked environment, utopia as a wet dream. Even Linda, the disgruntled outcast, falls prey to this pelvic tingle: “But they’re stuck,” she says to Dawn’s boyfriend on the outside, after she’s slept with him. “I mean, don’t you find that fascinating? Or sexy? Or whatever? ” (Miles 2016) the others fought with each other, sometimes violently, and one died of electrocution while exploring the Biosphere’s machinery”. 6 Both Zucker (2016) and Harrison (2016) call the novel an “ecological soap opera.” Michelle (2016) speaks of “a soap opera under a bubble” and “a soap opera in book form.” Jiang (2016) refers to it as “a disappointing soap opera.” Hitchings (2016) calls it “an upmarket soap opera.” And Scholz (2017) dubs it “eine Seifenoper.” T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 141 It is Linda who offers the most appropriate comment on the novel’s ongoing circle of sexual encounters when she sarcastically comments: “G.C. should stage La Ronde next, because that’s what it’s been like lately” (307) and thus links the tedious sequence of short-term affairs in The Terranauts to Arthur Schnitzler’s controversial play Reigen (1897), her familiarity with which is highly improbable and yet another example of Boyle’s tendency to intrude. 6. Religion versus Science When John Allen and his team started to build their Biosphere 2 in 1987, President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative of 1984 had fueled widespread interest in the new frontier of space, and the construction of a scaled-down and self-sufficient replica of the earth made people think of the creation of a new paradise. Reider characterizes the public reaction to the fascinating venture by saying that “to America, Biosphere 2 seemed simultaneously a potential utopia in space and an escape vehicle from the distressed Planet Earth - both a remade Garden of Eden and a Noah’s Ark fleeing toward the stars,” and she comments that “it might appear surprising, on first glance, that the stories of genesis should resonate so strongly during the creation of Biosphere 2, among a group of people who were hardly Bible readers. But the decidedly secular builders were not the only ecologists of their time to find meaning in biblical myths.” (Reider 2009: 77, 92) Boyle adopts such biblical parallels for his novel, in which the relation between science and religion is frequently, and often ironically, thematized. Thus, when in reaction to a life-threatening drop of the O 2 -level the Terranauts quarrel about whether they should break closure, Gretchen wants to get out because she is afraid of lasting brain damage and says that she plans to go on writing papers and “use all the brain power God gave me” (431). When Ramsay, the aggressive atheist, skeptically asks “God who? ” (431), she exasperatedly retorts “I believe in science! ” (431) and thus revealingly mixes religion and science. Gretchen’s muddled argument illustrates what Boyle observed in a 2016 interview with Amy Brady: We have forsaken religion as a kind of voodoo in favor of the rationalist’s religion, science. But, of course, as we have decoded the human genome and mapped out our neurological and endocrine functions, we see that free will is very much a mixed bag - more and more we understand that we are driven by biological necessity, which only makes sense, given that we are walking aggregates of cells. Needless to say, science doesn’t give us the ultimate answers any more than religion does - somewhere out there, distantly, the two converge and we are left, sadly, with a big dense expanding cloud of voodoo. (Qtd. in Brady 2016) Peter Freese 142 The Terranauts generally consider religion an outdated superstition, and Ramsay expressly rejects Christmas as “beyond irrelevant” and as “a coercive brainless holdover from primitive times” (237). But they nevertheless find the analogies between God’s creation of paradise and their construction of a new and self-sufficient man-made world so compelling that they cannot but think of their project in terms of Christian history. Thus, when Richard refers to the ecosphere as “the Garden of Eden set down on the deck of an aircraft carrier” (83), Boyle has him borrow this phrase from Roy Walford, the medical officer of the first biospherian team, who used it to express the innovative fusion of religion and science. 7 Tricia Berner, one of the new project members, calls E2 a “New Eden and all” (140), and Ramsay relates it to “the peaceable kingdom” (171), conjuring up both the eschatological state inferred from the Books of Isaiah and Hosea and the Sermon on the Mount, and the famous picture by Edward Hicks. The Terranauts think of Jeremiah Reed, “the visionary who’d dreamed up the project” (12), as “G.C., short for God the Creator” (12), and they call Darren Iverson, the millionaire who finances the project, “G.F., short for God the Financier” (14). Judy Forester, the chief aide and mistress of G.C., is called Judas “because she was a betrayer, or at least that was her potential” (12), and Dennis Roper, who is in charge of Mission Control, is called “Little Jesus” (12). Therefore, after Ramsay has betrayed his ‘God’ by sleeping with Judy and the freshly cuckolded but unsuspecting G.C. lovingly escorts him to the ecosphere, he extends the analogy by musing: “If God evicted Adam from the Garden of Eden for the sin of disobedience - or, as some people maintain, for getting down and dirty with Eve - my own deity, G.C., put an arm around me and walked me out the door […] to the airlock of the New Eden” (57). It is in this context that both Richard and Linda ironically refer to the festive pre-closure dinner as “The Last Supper” (51, 58) and that Linda’s characterization of Ramsay as “the serpent, the seducer, the liar and cheat and rotten core of the whole crew” (62) and “the true snake of the crew” (64; see 49) assumes an additional meaning. Biblical parallels are also evoked when Ramsay talks about the harmless snakes they brought into E2 and says that “ours was the kind of paradise in which the serpent was represented by two species only” (123) and therefore is “an innoxious paradise” (123). Later, he uses another biblical analogy when he defends his “irresistible fantasy of sex under glass” (109) by arguing that no space colony could survive without procreation: […] if the humans don’t mate, don’t reproduce, what good is it? The Bible might be sketchy on all this, Adam and Eve hunkering down to generate two 7 See Reider (2009: 102): “the entire ecosystem would be unable to survive without a basement full of machines. Biospherian Roy Walford would later call it ‘the Garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier.’” T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 143 sons and then another son to replace the murdered one, two more sons after that and a pair of daughters as well, leaving open the question of where the sons’ wives had come from (unless God approved of incest or they found some other bright-eyed scampering hominid to trade genes with), but in the world we were projecting, sex and genetic diversity were key, for our species and all the others too. If E2’s raft of creatures failed to reproduce, then the whole thing was a bust. (109) The analogy between E2 and paradise is also called up when in a heated debate Gyro says about Dawn that “she’s pregnant for Christ’s sake! ” and Ramsay cryptically comments “Christ had nothing to do with it. He came way after.” When the irritated Gyro asks “after what? ” a smiling Ramsay says “Adam” (330). When an enraged Judy explains to Linda what has been decided in her absence, she says it was all Ramsay’s doing: “Spin it this way, he says, first child born off earth in the history of mankind, E2 the New Eden, make it biblical” (360). This is taken up when Ramsay and Dawn’s child is christened Eve and when Ramsay drives home the biblical associations by saying in an interview that if the child had been a boy it would have been called Adam. Later, Ramsay refers once more to the Bible when he says: “We might need our heroes and mad saints to live for us, but we certainly don’t want to exchange places with them and all the while we’re yearning for the sick thrill of their temptation and fall. Read Genesis. They got that right, at least.” (479) And since E2 is meant to be a clone of the endangered earth in which life might go on when E1 is destroyed, there is of course always an implied parallel to another biblical story, namely that of Noah’s Ark. But the Christian parallels and references are too fragmentary and dispersed to create a coherent subtext, and Jonathan Miles (2016) rightly observed that “Boyle drapes his novel with enough Christian symbolism […] to suggest, or at least nod toward, a pious allegory: the Augustinian notion that libido was what spoiled the Garden of Eden, just as, in a sense, it makes a big hot mess of the E2 mission. But Boyle is too agile and feisty a thinker to hew to this line.” It is in the context of the tension between religion and science, belief and knowledge that both Ramsay and Linda make comments which remain incomprehensible to readers unfamiliar with the history of B2. Ramsay begins his story by saying “They can call me a corporation man all they want, yet what’s a corporation really but a group of people getting together to advance mankind,” and then continues with the sudden disclaimer “and no, we are not and never have been a cult and G.C. is no guru, or not anymore, or he won’t be once we’re inside” (28). Later, however, he thinks about his need for a well-paying job after his time in E2 and speculates about leaving the ecosphere team because there he can only expect “minimum wage - cultists really didn’t get paid” (440). Linda, in direct contrast to Ramsay, says that “Mission Control worked us hard and got what they wanted out of us, the way any cult will. And we Peter Freese 144 were a cult, no different from any hippie-dippy commune except that we had science on our side, or thought we did.” (58) And later she deplores that she has never been to Mexico, although it is so close, and adds that “that just goes to show what giving yourself up to a cult can do for your travel horizons” (351). All these statements refer to the fact that critics who doubted the scientific dignity of the B2 project used to concentrate on the suspicious prehistory of John Allen and his play-acting friends and their ‘unscientific’ approach and began to write them off as just another of the many hippie communes of the sixties. John Allen angrily rejected his team being called a ‘commune’ or a ‘utopia’ and, as Ramsay does in the novel, insisted that it was an “organization.” (Reider 2009: 17) This, however, did not prevent the press from insinuating that B2 was not a scientific venture, and the worst attack came in April 1991 when Marc Cooper published his article “Take This Terrarium and Shove It” in the Village Voice. There he expostulated “The Media Loves It, Yale Loves It, Phil Donahue Thinks It’s Neat, the Smithsonian Lends Its Name, Scientists Take Its Money - So What if the Biosphere 2 Is Really Run by a Wacko Cult? Don’t You Want to Go to Mars? ” and condemned the project as a pseudoscientific sham that was run by a cult. (Cooper 1991: 24; Reider 2009: 168) Allen and other members of the project tried to defend themselves, but the press increasingly switched from discussing the scientific implications of the project to viewing it as a theatrical survival stunt. More important than the novel’s scattered religious implications is the fact that Boyle makes several of its actors clearly express his Darwinist convictions. Thus, at its beginning, Ramsay reports that every precaution has been taken to prevent medical problems in the closed ecosphere but that a serious illness of any of the eight Terranauts would nevertheless mean death, and he states: “Death was as much a part of natural processes as life, and in strictly Darwinian terms, practical terms, that is, it would be a boon for the other seven.” (30) In another context, he reflects that “there are winners and losers in this life” and adds: “Go ask Darwin. Or Spencer. Or Steven Jay Gould” (47), referring to the English naturalist who introduced the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, to the English philosopher who applied the notion of ‘the survival of the fittest’ to the realms of sociology and ethics, and to the American evolutionary biologist who showed that most evolution is characterized by periods of evolutionary stability infrequently punctuated by periods of branching speciation. Later, Ramsay observes that the growth and decay of different plants in the ecosphere happens “by way of natural selection” (299), and when the shocked Terranauts observe a wild fight between the galagos Lola and Luna, two of the small nocturnal primates from continental Africa which are on E2’s list of species, he comments that now they have become “spectators to the violence that was as elemental as life itself” (121). When Judy asks him on the phone what happened with the galagos, he looks out into the rain forest biome and says “It’s a jungle out T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 145 there” (131). And when Gavin says to Linda that his parents have told him they are praying for his success, Linda answers “what’s the use of praying in a Darwinian universe? ” (451). Dawn reports that at the climactic moment of closure, one of the Terranauts starts “hooting in imitation of the galagos” (82). The others join him, and “in the next moment we all took it up, filling the place with the ecstatic full-throated cries of another kind of primate, the apex predator of E2, its nurturer and winnower, its gods under glass, going ape” (82). Later, she says that “the ape hoot […] was to become our team anthem as the weeks drifted by” (89). This detail implies that humans are just “another kind of primate” who can all too easily “go ape,” with the idiom that means ‘to become very excited or uncontrollably angry’ now taken literally as meaning ‘to revert to being an ape.’ The notion of man as ape is again taken up in the context of Gyro’s masturbation. When the controllers debate whether this is “anomalous behavior” (151), Dennis says “apes do it, monkeys” (151), and when Judy interposes “we’re not apes” (152), Linda, who knows about Judy’s sexual transgressions, answers “I’m sorry, but that’s exactly what we are” (152). When Dawn observes about the pigs in her care that one could talk to them and “see the interest in their eyes when they recognized you as the tall ape with the bare feet and the bucket of slops in hand” (227), she once more uses the man-ape analogy. And when at the novel’s end the inebriated Ramsay suddenly realizes that he will not go back inside and runs away into the desert “like somebody who had no principles, who had never had any principles, who was driven by the raw impulses of the id” (480), he also ‘goes ape’ in the sense of giving up rational thought and reverting to his basic urges. The concept of man as a predatory primate lurking behind what on the surface is just an enthusiastic utterance, Dawn’s characterization of man as “the tall ape,” and Ramsay’s regression to “the raw impulses of the id” display Boyle’s Darwinian conviction, which also lies behind the novel’s bleak ending. Dawn decides against all odds to stay with her daughter in E2 for another two years. Ramsay, once the glowing defender of “the mission über alles” (336), puts his comfort and freedom above his duties and deserts his wife and daughter. Telling about his last talk with Dawn at the window, he rationalizes his behavior by speculating on how hard it is “to be married to an icon” (490), shifts the guilt for their separation to his wife by insinuating that there is “a point at which duty and determination become just another kind of fanaticism” (490), and then concentrates on his secret affair with Judy. And the humiliated and “heartbroken” (497) Linda single-mindedly devotes her whole life to “settling scores” (504) and achieving her personal revenge. Consequently, Boyle’s readers learn little to nothing about the results of the mission but have to recognize that one may take the greatest care and spend $150 million on an unheard-of ecological experiment, but that what will make it fail is not scientific miscalculations or technical mistakes but the incontrovertible Peter Freese 146 fact that human beings, as totally dedicated as they may be to a shared aim, will ultimately give in to their basic urges and ‘go ape.’ It is this view which Boyle also expressed in no uncertain terms in a 2017 interview: “On the surface, you’ve got these bickering characters who purport to be scientists. But, really, what it is about is an animal species. We are an animal species. We can’t separate ourselves from that whether we build a glass dome around it or not.” (Qtd. in Spencer 2017) 7. Plays and Novels, Films and Songs For the charismatic John Allen and his group, theater was a crucial means of relating their ideas and projects to real life. In the sixties, they started staging plays in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the neighborhood in which the hippie counterculture originated. Then they went to New York where they rented a theater studio in Manhattan, and in 1969 they moved to New Mexico and used the family inheritance of John Allen’s wife Marie Harding to buy an estate near Santa Fe which they named the Synergia Ranch. There they lived together, dreamed of a better world, and combined their studies of philosophy, ecology and art with exercises in meditation, the study of group dynamics and strenuous work on the land. Every member of the group had to read an informal canon of texts thought necessary for what they considered a synergetic civilization, and their schedule consisted of “weekend theater practices, Sunday night speeches, intensive group self-examination work using Bion’s theories of group dynamics 8 and John Allen’s complicated thought-structuring exercises, and of course, nightly dinners together.” (Reider 2009: 93) Acting was mandatory because “on stage and in theater practices, the ranch residents were learning to toy with their identities and relationships, to work through historical patterns, and to experiment with future possibilities. Indeed, that became the name of their troupe: the Theater of All Possibilities.” (Reider 2009: 31) They not only performed on the ranch where they built a geodesic-domed theater, but also - later calling themselves the “Caravan of Dreams” - traveled around the world putting on “plays by every great theater tradition, jumping from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to Goethe and Moliere to Bertolt Brecht; from Japanese Kabuki to Hindu kathakali dance theater to colorful European expressionism.” (Reider 2009: 32) The versatile John Allen, who had a bachelor’s 8 Wilfred Ruprecht Bion (1897-1979) was a British psychologist who studied group behavior. Allen got to know his work during his time at Harvard and it would become increasingly important in his life. At the Synergia Ranch, the members studied Bion’s Experiences in Groups: Human Relations (1948-51) in order to analyze their own interpersonal dynamics. - In Boyle’s novel, Ramsay says that there was a library in E2, containing among other books “Bion’s Experiences in Groups; Mumford’s Technics and Civilization” (52). T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 147 degree in engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, was not only a gifted actor, but he also wrote poems and plays, and for him and his followers science and art needed to be combined. Reider observes that the performance they put on together as the Theater of All Possibilities, on stage and in life, was not merely an off-the-wall farce. It was a microcosm of a grander drama about humans and ecology at the end of the twentieth century. I discovered that the story was not just about one group of dreamers, but of a culture’s desperate quest to transform the destructive relationship between humans and the rest of nature; a quest to create a more beautiful and perfect world, and to create the human social forms up to the task. (Reider 2009: 10) When they started to build B2, which, as Allen insisted, was “a work of art as much as a work of engineering or a scientific experiment,” (Allen 1991: 3). Linda Leigh, who would become the Terrestrial Wilderness Manager of the first team, said: “The idea was that … everything is an illusion, everything is theater; the Biosphere is some of the most amazing theater that there is, so we’d better be good at being good actors.” (Reider 2009: 108) Before they began to build, the actors had performed Allen’s adaptations of Faust and of Gilgamesh, and played with parables about the exercise of power and the conquest of nature, and when they moved to the construction site, with Margret Augustine as director, in a ranch house built on a hilltop across from the rising Biosphere, they put on The Threepenny Opera, Deconstruction of the Countdown (a montage work adapted from the writings of William Burroughs), and Prometheus Bound, featuring Augustine herself as a silverpainted, glowing Prometheus. Even amid the rush of construction, the builders used theater exercises to work on their emotional responses and try to become more effective people. (Reider 2009: 131) When the first team entered B2, they kept up the tradition of “putting on skits and practicing theatrical exercises, but eventually these dissolved as some biospherians stopped coming to theater sessions.” (Reider 2009: 197) It was the tradition of the Theater of All Possibilities together with the fact that only few of the first team of biospherians had advanced scientific degrees that led to speculations about the project’s lack of scientific dignity, and journalist who adhered to the widespread notion that art and science are incompatible began to describe the group as just another commune with utopian ideas and Allen as their guru. Readers of Boyle’s novel need to know about this background not only to make sense of Ramsay’s insistence at the beginning of his tale that “no, we are not and never have been a cult and G.C. is no guru” (28), but also to understand Peter Freese 148 G.C.’s puzzling insistence that the Terranauts perform several plays and the importance which these plays acquire in the course of the novel. Before closure, Dawn says rather cryptically that “the project was as much about theater as it was science […]. But more on that later” (11), and concerning the Terranauts’ moving in and out of E2 during the months of preparation she comments “no matter: this was theater” (85). Ramsay admits that the attention-claiming marketing of the project includes a lot of theatrics and comments: “Call it science-theater. Call it a dramatization of ecological principles, under the guiding cosmology of Gaia” (41), thereby referring to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ ‘Gaia theory,’ which replaces Darwin’s notion of individualistic evolution with the concept that the earth as a whole functions as a self-regulating dynamic system. These general observations which use the concept of ‘theater’ in a metaphoric way become concrete when on the first day in E2, Dawn mentions in passing that she has “a paperback copy of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth” (96) with her, “which was the first play we’d be rehearsing inside - G.C.’s choice” (96). And a month after closure, Linda tells about an evening in a bar on which Tricia Berner talks about “The Skin of Our Teeth, which G.C. decreed was to be performed both inside and out” (139). Linda finds the play “corny, endless and outdated” (139), but Tricia argues that “G.C. is Mr. Antrobus. He did invent the wheel. And fire. And everything else.” (140) Gavin Helgeland chimes in with “plus there’s the whole environmental thing -,” Linda adds “and Biblical,” and Tricia observes that “E2 has all that going for it, New Eden and all, so it just seems natural -” (140). When Johnny skeptically asks about the play, “Isn’t that the sort of thing you only see in high school? ” (140), Gavin answers: “That’s not the point. The point is it’s got relevance for us, for E2 - Wilder was way ahead of his time there. I mean, global warming. Glaciers. The flood.” (141) In late May, Linda and Dawn spend “a whole two weeks of [their] evening free-time […] standing at the visitors’ window feeding each other lines” (144) from the play, with Dawn having been assigned the role of Mrs. Antrobus by G.C., who “is directing both productions, inside and out” (144), and Linda playing different minor roles. Apart from Tricia’s and Gavin’s rather vague hints at certain parallels between Wilder’s play and the Terranauts’ mission, so far it remains unexplained why a group of scientists embarking upon an unheardof experiment should engage in amateur theater and why they should produce a 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning allegory about the life of humankind, which gets its title from Job 19: 20 - “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.” - and breaks almost every established theatrical convention. But then, a first tentative explanation is offered as to what G.C. might want to achieve with having his people perform this particular play, and it is Linda who states that The Skin of Our Teeth “is comedy and firmly tongue-in-cheek absurdist, the way G.C. (and to tell the truth, most of us) likes it and after T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 149 the earnestness of what we’re doing day in, day out, a few laughs are just what the doctor ordered” (144). By the end of June, Dawn mentions in passing that Richard uses “the mock-pompous delivery he brought to bear when he assumed the voice of the narrator during rehearsals of the Wilder play” (160), in February of the second year Linda says with regard to a new play that “the plan is to perform two consecutive performances, inside and out, as with The Skin of Our Teeth” (264) and thus confirms that Wilder’s play has been staged by both the E2-team and the outside crew: and in November Ramsay remembers that the crew had “been hard-pressed to find the relevance” (426) of Wilder’s play. The second play the puzzled Terranauts are ordered to perform is Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950), a seminal work of the Theater of the Absurd. It is Linda who reports that the outside crew has “staged a public production of Rhinoceros as part of the buildup for the final selection, just to remind everybody of our commitment to theater and its foundational function” (264), but when shortly before the first-year anniversary G.C. announces that now they will have to produce The Bald Soprano, everybody is baffled. Malcolm disgustedly asks “what’s the obsession with the Theater of the Absurd? ” (265), and Linda rejects the play as “just stupid, that’s all, amateurish, like something you’d see in a TV sitcom if sitcoms allowed for long strings of non sequiturs” (265), but then she comes up with the rather cryptic explanation “Because we’re living it, that’s why” (265). As they did with the Wilder play, Linda and Dawn spend at lot of time at the window learning their lines, and now Linda describes Ionesco’s play as “a satiric thrust at middle-class banality and the meaninglessness of polite chitchat” (266). She adds that she cannot imagine what it has to do “with us, with the environment, with closure,” but “that’s part of G.C.’s mystique - he’s forever laying the unexpected on you, playing with the conventions, and when you think about it, that’s liberating, it really is, and no irony intended” (266f.) Later, Ramsay says to Dawn that they “could be doing Mr. and Mrs. Smith here” (289; see 439) and thereby refers to the London couple of the Smiths who in Ionesco’s play talk in non sequiturs and thus express the futility of communication in modern society. About the third and last play the Terranauts are asked to perform, Ramsay says: “What [G.C.] wanted was for us to give two performances, with an alternating cast, of Sartre’s No Exit, a play in which a man and two women are locked in a hellish afterlife in a single room, during which their only amusement is tearing each other to pieces” (427). At first he cannot make sense of that choice and comments: “If we’d been hard-pressed to find the relevance in The Skin of Our Teeth and The Bald Soprano, we were entirely clueless this time around.” (426) But then he recognizes the appropriateness of G.C.’s choice and understands that it is G.C.’s purpose “to defuse things. To make us act out our aggressions, even our hopelessness, and let us wallow in Aristotelian catharsis until we saw Peter Freese 150 our way to freedom, because we had an exit” (427). He also realizes the wisdom behind’s G.C.’s decision to have this play performed twice on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. By then, conditions in E2 have worsened and the performances are meant “to distract us as best he could” (437), and Ramsay describes in detail how “the zingers the characters threw at each other resonated inside us like bomb blasts” (438). The fact that Boyle uses a meanwhile proverbial sentence from Sartre’s play - “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” - as one of the mottoes of his novel once more confirms its central importance, because by the time the Terranauts perform this play they have come to a point where “everybody was getting on everybody’s nerves” (426) and all of them have learned the hard way what Sartre formulated as ‘hell is other people.’ It is with regard to the surprising role which theatrical performances played in the Biosphere project that Boyle’s artistic combination of historical facts and literary fictions becomes especially obvious. He adopts both the crucial role of the theater and the growing rejection of its ‘unscientific’ nature by the critics in the history of B2, but then he selects three plays which played no role in the real project but which he considers to be sufficiently familiar to his readers to make sense within the fictional world of the Terranauts. With regard to further literary references, here as in his previous novels Boyle shows himself as an extremely well-read writer who loves to intersperse his tales with erudite references to a wide range of books, films and songs. If he employs, as he usually does, an effaced omniscient narrator, his readers are impressed by that person’s knowledge, but if he has his protagonists tell their own stories, as he does in The Terranauts, he needs to make sure that their references are compatible with their presentation as characters. Since Dawn and Linda have degrees in environmental studies and animal sciences respectively, it is Ramsay from whom one most likely expects literary allusions, because he is the crew member about whom Dawn says that “you were the lit major, not me” (111) and who later reveals that he gave up his idea to become a biologist when he “discovered the power of the written word” (342). When Ramsay describes G.C. as “Vonnegut-tall, sixty and looking ten years younger” (56), Boyle lets him refer in passing to one of his own favorites. But when he reports that “William Burroughs” (51; see 53), whom also Linda mentions (see 265), is among the guests of honor at the closure celebration, Boyle once more uses the history of B2, because it was Burroughs who not only suggested that galagos should be included in the biosphere’s fauna, 9 but who also visited B2 under construction and faxed a note at the first closure in which he 9 “Before moving into the biosphere, eight crew members (four men and four women) traveled the world to collect thirty-eight hundred species of plants and animals to inhabit the experiment, including a small lemur-like creature called a galagos, T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 151 salut[ed] the eight brave Biospherians who embark today on this noble experiment. The Closing of Biosphere II is a turning point in human history, and a step in the right direction towards the development of mankind’s potential. The hopes of the Planet go with you into inner space, for the sake of the dream of outer space. And to those who ask you “Quo vadis? ” tell them: “Ad Astra per aspera! ” ( Gray 2018) And when Ramsay explains that “we were trying to emphasize the way our new technics melded art and ecology in a synergistic flow” and that “Burroughs’ books - especially Naked Lunch and the cut-up texts like The Soft Machine and Nova Express - helped push our thinking in new directions” (51f.), he refers to Burroughs’ speculative ideas about an impending merging of science and art which greatly influenced Allen. When a jealous Judy, infuriated by Ramsay and Dawn playing in the muck of the pig sty, takes her lover to task about his undignified behavior, Ramsay retorts that it “would be bootless” to tell her that he is not unfaithful. She does not understand the archaic term and asks “Bootless? What the hell is that supposed to mean? ” whereupon he explains: “Useless. You know, as in Shakespeare? ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.’” (114). What Ramsay quotes here are the second and third lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, and although it would be far-fetched to try to establish parallels between the speaker of the sonnet and Ramsay, it is quite appropriate that a literature major has such a quotation up his sleeve. When later Ramsay is fishing for tilapia and Dawn, who has just had a difficult talk with G.C. about what to do about her pregnancy, joins him, she is disgusted about the leeches stuck to his thigh. He tells her that they entered E2 as intruders and then explains to the readers that if you want leeches you must stand still, “like the old leech gatherer in the Wordsworth poem. Who baited them with his own blood.” (344) Here, Ramsay’s reference to Wordsworth’s 1807 poem “Resolution and Independence” seems to be hardly more than a proof of his wide reading, but when one considers that the leeches got into E2 as “stowaways” (344) just like the baby which Dawn is going to have, and that later Ramsay confesses that he cannot bond with his newborn daughter, whom he harshly considers “an excrescence, an irritation” (423), and states that he had “an easier time bonding with the leeches in the fish ponds (pun intended)” (423), this turns out to be one of Boyle’s characteristic erudite allusions. The most unusual literary reference, however, occurs when Troy, the emergency dentist who has just beaten up Ramsay, sets out to repair the latter’s aching molar, and Ramsay thinks about “a Browning poem I hadn’t thought of in years” (426). All he can remember are the two lines “If hate killed me, Brother suggested by Mr. Allen’s friend, William S. Burroughs; ” http: / / www.artic.edu/ aic/ collections/ artwork/ 186153. Peter Freese 152 Lawrence, / God’s blood, would not mine kill you! ” (426), which come from the unidentified poem “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” In this 1842 anticlerical outburst, Browning has one brother express his hatred for a fellow monk who fails in his Christianity, and Ramsay uses this little-known poem to describe the relation between himself and Troy which is also characterized by discord bordering on hatred. Some other references are more obvious. When the Terranauts go for a swim in their artificial ocean, Ramsay is aroused by Dawn in a bikini and, jumping into the water, thinks of “John Cheever, one of [his] favorite writers” and his story “The World of Apples” (182) “in which the old poet is purged of his lust in a mountain pool” (182). When he cleans the stables with Dawn, whose most important job as “MDA, Manager of Domestic Animals” (7) is milking the goats, Ramsay thinks of Thomas Hardy and more especially of “the pivotal scene in Jude the Obscure in which Arabella Donn, the lusty farmer’s daughter, attracts Jude Fawley’s attention by flinging a pig’s genitalia at him” (111). He tells Dawn about it, who says that she does not know that novel but remembers “the movie Tess, though” (111), that is, Roman Polanski’s 1979 film version of Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). The rather obvious comparison of Dawn with Tess is later taken up by Dawn herself when she thinks of “Tess. The knocked-up milkmaid” (284). But when Boyle has Dawn tell Ramsay that she does not know Jude the Obscure, he obviously makes a mistake because earlier she reports that she and Linda have taken to call Judy “Jude the Obscure, given some of her counterintuitive pronouncements from on high” (12). Dawn rather surprisingly reports that she has taken “a shelf of books I always wanted to read” into E2, namely, “the Russians mostly - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn” (96). And later Ramsay will tell that during a staff meeting “E., who’d been plowing through the Russians in her spare time, gave a reading from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which seemed grimly appropriate” (179; see 181). When she remembers that during their training off the coast of Belize the Terranauts “read Dickens aloud round a campfire” (225) and tells about a rule they adopted “from Lord of the Flies that only the person in possession of the conch had the floor” (188), she refers to generally known writers. But her special favorite is E. B. White, the author of children’s books and a lifelong contributor to The New Yorker, because, in connection with her love for the pigs she is looking after, she talks at length about White’s essay “Death of a Pig” and his children’s book Charlotte’s Web (228), which deals with the livestock pig Wilbur, who is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, and his friendship with the spider Charlotte. Linda prefers to read “sci-fi (Clarke, Bradbury, Salmón and especially Clayton Unger’s Bigger Bang series, about terraforming distant planets)” (148). The British writer Arthur C. Clarke, who is best known for having co-written the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 153 the American writer Ray Bradbury, whose Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is a classic, are established science-fiction authors, whereas Salmón and Clayton Unger’s Bigger Bang series, to which also Ramsay refers as Linda’s preferred reading (see 292), could not be identified and might have been made up by Boyle. When Linda talks to an emaciated Dawn at the E2 window, she says that she feels like “talking to the Tin Man - or the Tin Woman” (317). On the surface this is a reference to a character from Lyman Frank Baum’s famous children’s book The Wizard of Oz (1900), but it would not be beyond Boyle to insert a tongue-in-cheek allusions to another and widely unknown text. While they were erecting B2, the biospherians, who shared Gurdjieff’s views about man’s role in the development of the world, performed a play titled Tin Can Man, in which a group of people determine to take charge of evolution. (Reider 2009: 122) It is quite plausible that Linda is interested in science fiction, but when she comments on Dawn entering the ecosphere and her having to stand back by stating that “Samuel Beckett […] said it best: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’” (76), quoting a sentence from the end of Beckett’s novel The Unnamable (1953), when she says about people in a bar that they are “staring at the TV screen as if it’s the Book of Revelation” (65), and when she comments on the changing couples around her by saying that “G.C. should stage La Ronde next” (307), one can hardly help feeling that here Boyle intrudes. As far as films are concerned, Ramsay refers to Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still (42), a 1951 black-and-white sci-fi film about a humanoid alien visiting the earth; to Alien (129), a 1979 sci-fi horror film about an aggressive extraterrestrial creature that stalks the crew of a spaceship; to The Godfather, Part II (127), a 1974 crime film based on Mario Puzo’s novel about the Mafia; and to the 1971 musical Grease (485). Dawn alludes to both Star Trek (14, 155) and Star Wars (106); to Sigourney Weaver in Alien (273); to Silent Running (14), a 1972 postapocalyptic sci-fi film which depicts a future in which all plant life on earth has become extinct; to Eraserhead (412), David Lynch’s 1977 horror film about a man left to care for his grossly deformed child in a desolate industrial landscape; and to the musicals Hair (16), Man of La Mancha (16), and The Phantom of the Opera (169). And Linda refers to Ice Station Zebra (151), a 1968 Cold War era espionage film based upon a novel by Alistair MacLean; to Buckeroo Banzai (315), a 1984 sci-fi comedy film about a polymath who tries to save the world by defeating a band of inter-dimensional aliens; to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (312), a 1967 prison drama film starring Newman as an inmate in a Florida prison camp who refuses to submit to the system; to Stranger than Paradise (195), a 1984 absurdist comedy film; to The Sound of Music (151), a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and film about the Trapp family; and to “the live-action remake of The Jungle Book” (256). Most of these references are triggered by similarities, as when Dawn is afraid that her daughter might be born “all twisted and deformed like the little monster Peter Freese 154 in Eraserhead” (412) or as when Linda, on a hot day, observes that the greenhouses are “scorching, like the hole they put Paul Newman in in Cool Hand Luke” (312), but they do not evoke additional subtexts. Given the situation of the Terranauts, it is no surprise that the majority of the films referred to belong to the science-fiction genre, and Dawn makes that point when she says: “Star Trek was one of our touchstones, as was Silent Running, for obvious reasons.” (14) Apart from literary texts and films, Boyle also likes to use popular music to sketch in the cultural background and help to characterize his actors by their preferences, but in contrast to other novels, as for example Budding Prospects, 10 here these references sound no deeper metaphorical notes. Ramsay has brought his guitar into E2 and performs “a couple Nirvana songs” and “some early Dylan” (179), he loathes Nat King Cole’s “Silent Night” as “dripping treacle” but employs it in his attempt to seduce Dawn (253), and he loves the American blues singer Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, especially his 1974 Dreamer album (254). Dawn knows Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sung by Kurt Cobain (23), and in her story about Linda’s trauma she refers to “Baba O’Riley” (214) and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (214) by The Who. She once attended “a Talking Heads concert at Bard” (223), knows that T. T. likes to listen to “industrial rock, Ministry or maybe Nine Inch Nails” (278), and is aware that Wayne Newton (375) is one of the best-known singer-entertainers in Las Vegas. And Linda reports that at the boarding ceremony “Fletwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’ - Just tell me that you want me! ” (73) - is played, compares Gavin’s eyes and haircut to “that singer in The Cure” (138), disgustedly reports that the jazz trio at Alfano’s “lurches from ‘Night and Day’ into ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ as if they’re doing a medley for schizophrenics” (315) and says that on another occasion Tricia sings “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha (449). 8. Conclusion Boyle’s carefully researched novel The Terranauts makes competent use of the actual history of an outstanding scientific experiment, translates the authentic Biosphere 2 into the fictional Ecosphere 2, and mixes historical facts and figures with invented ones. Boyle uses three protagonistnarrators, two of whom report from inside E2, whereas the third, who is not chosen for the team, tells about the events from outside. This strategy makes it possible to combine two initially positive versions with a critical and resentful one, but the three colloquial, sometimes slangy, and often sexually outspoken voices are insufficiently distinguished and sound too much alike. Half of the members of the E2 team remain shadowy figures 10 See Freese (2019). T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 155 in the background, and the three main characters are depicted as rather immature and superficial. Despite several carefully researched passages about the ‘scientific’ aspects of the E2 experiment, the novel focuses too much on the sex life of the characters with their impulsive bondings and separations and their petty squabbles and poisonous jealousy, and several reviewers have rightly criticized it as an ecological soap opera. Boyle’s attempts to construe a subtext referring to the biblical parallels between E2 and both the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark remain fragmentary, but his Darwinian convictions are convincingly expressed through numerous analogies and images. Due to the relegation of the narrative voice to the three protagonist-narrators, a major strength of Boyle’s previous novels, namely their abundance of cultural and literary references, is greatly reduced. But the authentic aspect of the function of theater for the Terranauts is well integrated, and with his choice of the plays they perform Boyle adds an intriguing aspect. With regard to certain literary allusions, however, one cannot help feeling that often they do not fit the characters expressing them but come from an interfering authorial voice. With its depiction of a group of humans under glass with their private lives under unceasing surveillance, The Terranauts might be read as an appropriate critique of reality TV and the Internet, but the novel can only partly convince because it is too limited to “the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass” to sufficiently unfold the promising implications of its theme. References Ambermoon (2014). “T.C.Boyle - Die Terranauten/ The Terranauts.” Büchertreff (March 14). [online] http: / / www.buechertreff.de/ forum/ thread/ 96027-t-cboyle-die-terranauten-the-terranauts/ . Anonymous (2016). “Book Review: Speculative fiction tale The Terranauts is satirically limp and dramatically dull.” The National (Scotland) (October 17). [online] http: / / www.thenational.scot/ culture/ 14872252. Book_Review__Specu lative_fiction_tale_The_Terranauts_is_satirically_limp_and_dramatically_dull/ . Anonymous (2017). “Another winner from TC - The Terranauts by TC Boyle.” bookmunch (October 8). [online] http: / / bookmunch.wordpress.com/ 2017/ 10/ 08/ another-winner-from-tc-the-terranauts-by-tc-boyle/ . Allen, John (1991). Biosphere 2: The Human Experiment. Ed. Anthony Blake. New York: Viking Penguin. Bisley, Alexander (2016). “Interview: T. C. Boyle, ‘America is going to be like The Road … We’ll be eating each other’.” The Guardian (November 3). [online] http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2016/ nov/ 03/ tc-boyle-the-terranautsdonald-trump-nature. Boyle, T. Coraghessan (1993). “Apologia.” Water Music. New York: Penguin Books. Boyle, T. Coraghessan (2017). The Terranauts. New York: HarperCollins. Boyle, T.C. (n.d.). Personal homepage. [online] http: / / www.tcboyle.com/ page2. html? 2. Peter Freese 156 Brady, Amy (2016). “T.C. Boyle Reseals Biosphere 2 in The Terranauts.” Chicago Review of Books (October 25). [online] http: / / chireviewofbooks.com/ 2016/ 10/ 25/ t-c-boyle-reseals-biosphere-2-in-the-terranauts/ . Bryson Josh (2016). “Review: The Terranauts - T.C. 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[online] http: / / www.npr.org/ 2016/ 10/ 25/ 4987 24886/ fact-fiction-history-and-heart-converge-in-the-terranauts. Hitchings, Henry (2016). “The Terranauts by TC Boyle - ‘more soap opera than religious allegory’.” Financial Times (October 21). [online] http: / / www.ft.com / content/ 5ae0a322-953b-11e6-a1dc-bdf38d484582. Jiang, Andrew J. (2016). “The Absurd Folly of The Terranauts.” The Harvard Crimson (October 18). [online] http: / / www.thecrimson.com/ article/ 2016/ 10/ 18/ the-terranauts/ . Katsoulis, Melissa (2016). “The Terranauts by TC Boyle.” The Times (October 22). [online] http: / / www.thetimes.co.uk/ article/ the-terranauts-by-tc-boyle-pg7xs7 thp. Kennedy, Jackie Thomas (2016). “Review, The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle.” The Star Tribune (November 4). [online] http: / / www.startribune.com/ review-theterranauts-by-t-c-boyle/ 399913981/ . Michelle (2016). “Book Review - The Terranauts by T. C. Boyle.” That’s What She Read (October 25). [online] http: / / www.thatswhatsheread.net/ 2016/ 10/ book-review-terranauts-t-c-boyle/ . T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 157 Miles, Jonathan (2016). “The Terranauts by T. Coraghessan Boyle.” The New York Times (November 11). [online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2016/ 11/ 13/ books/ review/ t-c-boyle-terranauts.html. Pariat, Janice (2017). “Book Review: The Terranauts.” livemint (February 17). [online] http: / / www.livemint.com/ Leisure/ vEFDrKyGXNIrfhYnAW00TJ/ Book-Review-The-Terranauts.html. Reider, Rebecca (2009). Dreaming the Biosphere. The Theater of All Possibilities. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ropp, Thomas (1992). “Eco-Tourism.” Arizona Republic (May 17). Salinger J.D. (1951). The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Scholz, Aleks (2017). “Mein Leben mit TC Boyle: Terranauts.” Literatenfunk (January 9). [online] http: / / www.piqd.de/ literatenfunk/ mein-leben-mit-tc-boyleterranauts. Smiley, Jane (1993). “Snap, Crackle, Pop in Battle Creek.” The New York Times (April 25). [online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ books/ 98/ 02/ 08/ home/ boylewellville.html. Steffen, Will/ Jaques Grinevald/ Paul Crutzen/ John McNeill (2011). “Review: The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369. 842-867. Swedlund, Eric (2016). “T.C. Boyle Revisits a Real-Life, Failed Futuristic Experiment in His Novel The Terranauts.” Paste (October 26). [online] http: / / www.pastemagazine.com/ articles/ 2016/ 10/ tc-boyle-terranauts-tk.html. Zucker, Jake (2016). “I Relate It to You.” Electric Literature (December 8). [online] http: / / electricliterature.com/ i-relate-it-to-you-fcec4537420d. Zucker, Jake (2016). “I Relate It to You.” The Observer (October 21). [online] http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2016/ oct/ 21/ the-terranauts-tc-boylereview. Peter Freese Department of English and American Studies Paderborn University Germany