Colmare la distanza tra la Terra e la Luna: il caso di A Fire on the Moon di Norman Mailer

n 1961, President John F. Kennedy held an unforgettable speech to Con-gress in which he announced his goal of sending a man to the Moon by the end of the decade. Two years later, Hannah Arendt published an article entitled Man’s Conquest of Space, in which she expressed her skepticism towards the idea of a space mission. From her viewpoint, the science and technology employed to con-quer the Moon would drastically displace the main pillars of human discourse, imagination, and abstraction, to the point that “the stature of man would not simply be lowered” but “destroyed”. Arendt’s position prefigures the ambivalence that characterizes a number of fictional works and reportages published after the Apollo 11 Moon landing. In that respect, one of the most interesting instances is Norman Mailer’s novelistic reportage A Fire on the Moon, initially published in installments on “Life Magazine” between 1969 and 1970. A Harvard-educat-ed space engineer, Mailer captures the paradoxes and contradictions that, in his opinion, characterize the space mission, thus raising a fundamental question as to whether the Moon landing is the noblest enterprise of the century or a clear sign of humanity’s madness.