The story of the disappearance of flight MH370, falling from the sky into the sea, is the opposite of the one that held the world's attention in 2010: the survival and reappearance, from the depths of the earth, of the trapped Chilean miners. While it has been established beyond doubt that the plane crashed into the ocean, with no survivors, the families of the dead understandably refuse to accept this conclusion. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, people are pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed building after the search and rescue efforts have given way to the grim duty of recovery. The loss a vessel with all hands, a mass death from which no one escapes, is not inconceivable, but the idea of such a thing being incommunicable is so dreadful that we cling to the hope of a survivor long after it is plausible. Hence the power and reassurance of the lines from Job quoted by Herman Melville in the epilogue to Moby-Dick. "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." The black box embodies this idea of the survivor's story and testimony even in a situation where the loss of life has been total. Face to face with his fate, one of the last things Robert Redford's unnamed sailor does in the film All Is Lost is to write a brief message, put it in a bottle and throw it overboard. All may be lost but the hope is that this hand-scrawled version of the black box, will be found. If it is not We have seen in the last few weeks the speed with which theories and conspiracies whoosh into the information vacuum. In the absence of reliable facts we are left with the lines repeated hypnotically by Conrad at the end of The Secret Agent: "An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang forever over this act of madness or despair." In a post-post-religious age the inexplicable has retreated, like some endangered animal, to the wild and dangerous places of the imagination. The flipside of this is an increasing hunger for such sightings, a thirst for stories of inexplicable survival.
An extreme example occurred shortly before MH370 went missing, when the Mexican fisherman José Salvador Alvarenga was found after drifting at sea for 13 months. Amazement that he had survived for so long on a diet of raw turtles and rain water soon turned to suspicion. This is hardly surprising given a history of fictional tales passing themselves off as fact or of fact being turned into fiction so lengthy that it reaches back to the dawn of the English novel. The real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk was the basis for Robinson Crusoe, whose adventures, the first edition claimed, were "written by himself", not by Daniel Defoe. Meticulously itemised by William Golding in the novel Pincher Martin, the survival of the eponymous hero on a bare rock in the ocean is revealed, in the last lines, to have been not only a fiction we knew that from the outset but a parable. Even the fiction turns out to have been a fiction. Paradoxically, the more strictly stories of survival are stripped to their practical essentials the more readily they accumulate larger resonances. In his struggle to stay afloat Redford is like Sisyphus who, Camus insisted, we must imagine "happy". At one point, as one bit of ill-fortune is followed by another, Redford seems about to scream "Fuck". It never becomes a word, just a long howl of anguish: "Fffwwuuuh" Apart from this moment, he is in his element. This is what he came to sea for. And it would be wrong, as we hear those fateful words, "All is lost", to take this as an admission of regret. It would be just as accurate to say that he has achieved his destination.
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