Agential Entanglements and the Fluidity of Gaze in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital

Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel, captures a 24-hour period in the lives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts as they orbit the Earth in a space station. In this single day, the novel traces the observatory’s sixteen orbits shifting between the reflections and perspectives of each character while they observe the Earth from space. Interspersed throughout the narrative are references to Diego Velázquez’s famous painting Las Meninas, and this paper contends that the painting’s intricate interplay between the observer and the observed resonates with the novel’s central themes. The painting’s enigmatic compositional structure highlights an ambiguous and interwoven relationship between the subject and the object, which parallels the liminal position of the crew as they observe the planet. Although the crew view Earth from a seemingly detached position, their survival is inseparable from their entanglement with each other, the planet and the observatory. This intertwined condition requires a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subject and the object, challenging the anthropocentric mode of perception. Therefore, through the lens of Karen Barad and other new materialist thinkers, this paper aims to analyse how the novel calls for attentiveness to the dynamic flows among beings and the vitality of matter, advocating a more ethical and ecologically conscious mode of living.