The Worlds of Farscape (25 page)

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Michael G. Cornelius

Farscape
evinces an overarching narrative eminently—and compulsively—concerned with phenomenological constructions and ideologies of place. In the series' opening episodes, notions of place are used to aid in fashioning the identity constructs of the characters aboard the Leviathan starship Moya; they are, for example, all exiles, disconnected from their home worlds and territories: they are refugees, seeking both literal and proverbial safe harbor; they are nomadic, eschewing terrain-based rootedness in favor of the safety (and necessity) of flight; and, above all, they each desire the return to home, which represents for each of them a cultural and neomythic ideal as well as an actual physical realm. Even the name of the series,
Farscape
, suggests place; “scape,” of course, is a suffix referring to a scene or a view, reinforcing the predominance of place in the hierarchies of the show's epistemological composition.

If there is one cynosure to the series' monomania regarding place, however, it must be located in the construct of home: in home/worlds, in home/space, and in home/place. In the second episode of the series, Aeryn Sun, lamenting the turn of events that has caused her to join the motley, “home-less” group aboard Moya, angrily notes to John Crichton, “I stood up. And I no longer have a home,” to which Crichton hastily rejoins, “Well, join the club” (“I, E.T.”). The loss of home is keenly felt, and drives the action of the series. Yet, as a number of critics have pointed out, in
Farscape
, Moya herself becomes a home for the ramshackle group. Carlen Lavigne writes, “Action on
Farscape
largely takes place on Moya, which may be termed ‘the home'—the ship is, after all, the only home the characters know as it takes them from one planet to another” (58). Jes Battis agrees: “Moya, the living starship ... serves as a moving ‘home' for
Farscape's
characters” (11). Both critics qualify the use of the word “home” here, suggesting that Moya, the biomechanoid starship, the “living ship” as she is called in the series' premiere, is somehow less-than-satisfactory as a home, and, indeed, Moya lacks many of the physical and psychological accoutrements associated with homeplaces (“Premiere”). Yet “home” itself is almost always a qualified subject, as John Hollander has astutely observed: “there is no word so loaded as ‘home'” (38). Plus, as Nedra Reynolds suggests, “home is a place to end up and to unburden oneself ... [yet] we also need to consider homeplace or dwelling as always in flux, as forms of paradoxical or contested space” (153). For almost all of us, homes are problematic, far from perfect; they are never the idealized world popular culture fables like
The Wizard of Oz
suggest them to be. To tweak the old maxim, you
can
go home again—but would you want to? Don E. Merten notes, “Like the social order, home is a cultural construct insofar as it is more than the physical structure we label a house” (20). As a construct of culturally-accepted and socially-observed mores, values, beliefs, ideals, customs, traditions, rituals, and conventions—to name just a few of those tenuously slippery notions that are the actual building blocks of “home”—a home is more than just the sum of its parts or the individual quiddities of its inhabitants. Moya is no exception. As a “home,” she, too, has her flaws and faults and is built up of the needs, desires, and wishes of her occupants as much as any place. Michel Foucault perhaps sums up both the contradictory nature of home and the ways in which this contradiction is self-constructed when he writes, in “Other Spaces,” that

the space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light; we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another [14].

Moya is no exception to Foucault's observations; indeed, if anything, Moya proves the rules set down by Foucault. Far from being a void, Moya not only protects the identities of those who occupy her, but, indeed, possesses one of her own. In other words, Moya is a home who possesses consciousness, feelings, perceptions—in short, Moya is sentient space. As a living, breathing, thinking home, Moya is uniquely positioned as a partner in the exchange of identities that occurs between an individual and his/her homeplace and to influence the lives of the beings who reside within her. Moya is not only culturally constructed, but like Crichton, Aeryn Sun, D'Argo, and the others who dwell within, she is biologically, genetically, and psychologically constructed as well. Moya is continually in flux, as all individuals are; indeed, she is place within person as much as person within place. As such, Moya complicates the traditional relationship between familial unit and homeplace—a relationship already fraught with complication. As sentient space, Moya is keenly aware of her own status as homeplace, and as a result, is ultimately more reliant upon others—specifically those who dwell within her—to establish her own identity as sentient being than a generic individual should otherwise require.

Merten writes, “Home is where we start” (19). He is correct, though the obverse is likewise true: where we start, there is home. As such, the import of home is less the dimensional parameters of its physical realm—the walls, the roof, the yard—rather than the associations that are connected to this most intimate of spaces. As Merten writes, “Houses are not necessarily homes but become homes through the accretion of experiences while in them and the meanings appropriated from those experiences” (20). Yi-Fu Tuan agrees: “Home is an intimate place. We
think
of the house as home and place, but enchanted images of the past are evoked not so much by the entire building, which can only be seen, as by its components and furnishings, which can be touched and smelled as well” (144).

All space is constructed along similar lines. Reynolds writes, “Places evoke powerful human emotions because they become layered, like sediment or a palimpsest, with histories and stories and memories. When places are inhabited in the fullest sense, they become embodied with the kinds of stories, myths, and legends that ... can stimulate and refresh—or disturb and unnerve—their visitors” (2). This accumulation of psychological relevance is important in both constructing and defining space, as Tuan observes: “Space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning” (136). Just as important, however, is how the inhabitants of a particular place interpret the manifestations of the place's tautology of signs; Forrest Clingerman writes, “Place is defined through the interpretation of space,” indicating that the experience of a place—or, to be more precise about this, the experiences an individual has both
of
and
within
a place—is not as significant as to how those experiences are
considered
and
perceived
by the individual undergoing them (47). Space is everywhere, and, as any science fiction narrative demonstrates, it is vast; it can be traveled through, but remains a literal and metaphorical vacuum. Space is uninhabited. It is
place
that is lived in, place that influences its occupants and is, in turn, influenced by them. “Enclosed and humanized space is place;” everything else is simply (or, rather, not-so-simply)
there
(Tuan 54). Home is the most primary and primitive of spaces. It was the first space humanity ever created, a domicile not only to protect against the elements but also to unite socially-related groupings. Pointedly, Tuan declares, “Home is at the center of an astronomically determined spatial system,” suggesting our home is the (literal) center of our universe (149). We plot our lives, our beginnings and endings, from our home. Ann R. Tickamyer tells us, “Human agency shapes space and place; environments are socially constructed, often to embody the same principles and processes as other social institutions” (806). Conversely, as Reynolds observes, “geography fixes identities,” and, as Merten suggests, home is where individuals
practice
identity (149, 26). In short, we impact home as much as it impacts us. We are informed by our home as much as we inform it—its construction, its outward appearance, its outer façade and inner feel. Home is an impactful place; no matter how far removed from it we may become, its effect on us is easily observable every day of our lives.