A Single Day of Solitude: Reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital for an Object-Oriented Literary Geography

Abstract

This paper offers a reading of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023) in support of an ‘object-orientated’ literary geography. Informed by the wider movement of speculative realism but drawing heavily on Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) I provide a broad outline for a literary geography that recognises space as an emergent property of objects. Space in OOO is defined as the tensions between a ‘withdrawn’ real object and the ‘sensual qualities’ involved in the relations that exist with other objects. Focussing on the objects that are texts, the absence of relations is a fundamental theme. This is explored through a reading of Orbital: Harvey’s novel explores the disconnection and dislocation of life on the International Space Station, this quality being the inevitable concomitant of real objects withdrawing from other objects (including but not limited to human beings). Orbital’s narrative accordingly refuses the anthropocentrism inherent in the idea that the world can only be perceived as a correlative of human perception or knowledge. Readers can nevertheless relate to Orbital because spatiality is played out in the aesthetic experience of momentarily crossing the gulf between real objects and their sensual qualities. The mediating role of art, including the reading of imaginative literature, is emphasized as a way of alluding to ‘real objects’ beyond the human, the inherent limitations of consciousness and cognition matched by aesthetic attunement to the otherness of reality. Literary spatiality is thus enacted in both the withdrawal of real objects in literary texts and in their aesthetic allure.