Ambiguity of Identity in “Pure Pursuit,” a Love Story without Love by Maxine West
When I set out to write Pure Pursuit, my main objective was to write a romantic story without romance and a love story without any love. I’ve always been interested in aviation and the majesty of human flight, but also somewhat repulsed by the way that airplanes are co-opted into weapons of war, so a love story set during a life and death duel in the skies felt like the perfect way to live in that ambivalence. To create a stronger feeling of intimacy, I put the reader in the position of the enemy pilot, as I thought that having the narrator speaking directly to their partner-in-violence would help heighten the themes around communication and understanding than if the aim of affection was directed elsewhere.
Writing flash/micro fiction is a game of making rules as much as you break them, so the one rule I set for myself was that I wanted the piece to feel sexually charged without using any explicit sexual language. As I spent some time plumbing any information I could find on dog fighting tactics and jet fighter design I realized that this was already a very ripe topic to explore psycho-sexually. Incidentally, after the story had already been published I was watching an interview where a pilot described flying the F-16 as being “like he was wearing the airplane”.
I also find the ambiguity of identity of being a pilot really interesting. The plane becomes almost an extension of the body, but any other pilot or human interacting (passively or violently) with you has no way to know what you look like or who you are on the ground. Even if they could see inside the cockpit all they might see is a massive mirrored helmet and skin tight flight suit. Aviation, and military aviation especially, is considered to be a more “masculine” activity in patriarchal western culture yet there have been women pilots for almost as long as there have been airplanes. Exploring all of that was fun, but mostly I’m just proud that I was able to sneak in a Judith Butler reference to my dogfight story.
When I wrote the ending for Pure Pursuit, at first I was taken aback by how bleak and sardonic it was, but I also thought it was important to play into the theme. I wanted to leave the reader with the distinct sense that this wasn’t the narrator’s first nor their last tango in the skies, and to really lean on the allure of flight and combat. The more I think about the last line, the more depressed I get. When I first finished the piece, I imagined the narrator as a young, smirking, and sardonic ace pilot, but as I’ve gone through the publication process and read it aloud at a few different events I see them as a lot more tired, and old and withered warrior who can only relate to others through violence.
