ESSAY
ELIZABETH LEANE
POLAR DISCIPLINESIn the days leading up to my voyage south as an Australian Antarctic Arts Fellow in early 2004, my fear of physical danger (could an icebreaker capsize?) was matched only by my fear of social awkwardness. This was partly a straightforward anxiety about living for weeks in close quarters with strangers, but it was also very much a disciplinary anxiety. I gave little thought to being a woman (and a fairly ‘indoorsy' one at that) entering what numerous books, fiction and nonfiction, had warned me could be a very male world, but I was increasingly worried by the prospect of being a writer – worse still, a literary critic – among scientists. I should have been beyond this. I held degrees in both science and literature, the fields that C P Snow famously and contentiously identified as ‘two polar groups' separated by ‘a gulf of mutual incomprehension'.1 I had even written a doctoral thesis arguing for increased exchange between these ‘two cultures' and questioning (as many others have) the continuing relevance of Snow's polarised model of disciplinary relations. Yet, faced with the prospect of travelling south as a literary critic among scientists and tradespeople, I found myself falling back on an us/them mentality. Science is, as they say, the ‘currency of credibility' in the Antarctic. I wanted to tattoo ‘BSc' on my forehead to let the scientists on board know that I really did have some credibility, some solidity as a researcher, despite my guise as an Official Interpreter.
This ‘two cultures' anxiety was not produced by any actual encounters with Antarctic scientists either before or during my journey. My hesitant description of my book project (an analysis of images of Antarctica in literature) was met far more often with an enthusiastic response than a blank stare. My on-board seminar, which looked at ‘newspapers' produced by overwintering Heroic-Era explorers, was well attended. Expeditioners happily volunteered to be interviewed about their reading habits. My Voyage Leader made it clear that the objectives of the Arts Fellows were as important as those of any of the scientists. I was welcomed and accommodated. But my sense of imposture persisted. I was entering the ‘continent for science', the ‘natural laboratory' at the bottom of the world, without the camouflage of a white coat.
As the journey got under way and I started conducting my interviews, I began suffering a terrible case of scientist-envy. Why had I abandoned my budding science career? Why hadn't I become a zoologist? Why hadn't I recognised the obvious attractions of glaciology or seismology? The scientists were doing things: dropping nets overboard, watching for whales, keeping their krill cool. It only got worse as I visited the bases at Casey and Macquarie Island. Two people close to my age were about to stay on Macquarie for a winter, making a seismological survey of the whole island, staying out in huts for nights on end, trudging back and forth over that weird, wild plateau. Everyone's job seemed simultaneously more glamorous and more concrete than mine. Underneath all of this self-doubt, I began to realise that what I really longed for was the visibility of these scientists' work, their clear inputs and outputs. Maybe this is the peculiar anxiety of the writer: artists, sculptors, musicians and photographers all have obvious tasks. They are up on the ship's bridge sketching, on the deck selecting the most photogenic iceberg, out in the field with their recording equipment. Where was my task? I was conducting interviews, but I wasn't a sociologist; useful as those interviews might be in developing my own understanding of Antarctic communities, they were peripheral to my main purpose. I could write, but this was best done at my laptop in my cabin, and to have spent the long days holed up in my three-berth cabin would have defeated the purpose of my voyage. No, the real work would be done at home. My job was to observe, experience, feel and think; but surely everyone did that anyway?
My fears came to a head one evening, mid-voyage, at dinner in the mess. One of the stimulating things about travelling south on an expedition ship is that you find yourself chatting with people whom you'd rarely come across in your everyday life. On this occasion, I'd explained my book-in-progress to a group of my fellow diners. They were immediately curious, and began asking questions.
The first concerned the body of available material. Was there enough literature about Antarctica to sustain a book's worth of analysis? Fair enough question. If you looked at the work of some recent writers, you might answer in the negative. ‘Strip away the scientific concepts and the scientific lexicon and one is literally left speechless before the continent', asserts historian Stephen Pyne in The Ice.2 The continent has produced ‘no native tongue, no rites, no art, no jingoism', according to Thomas Keneally, who has himself authored two Antarctic-based novels.3 According to this perspective, Antarctica brings writers (as well as explorers) to their knees: its landscape is too extreme, too empty, too unearthly to find adequate representation; it exceeds our metaphors, our very language. But what place does not, in some sense, beggar description? Oceans, deserts, high mountain ranges and outer space all share ‘unwritable' qualities, but have compelled rather than repelled storytellers. Antarctica is no different. Having developed a bibliography of several hundred Antarctic-based novels, short stories, poems and plays, I view the idea that the continent has resisted artistic description not as an objective assessment but as one of the many myths the South Polar regions have produced. The lack of attention to the large body of creative work the continent has generated makes me wonder whether people – writers particularly – do not somehow need it to remain an unwritten place; whether to write imaginatively about the continent is in some way to besmirch it. Helen Garner, in a recent travel essay, pinpoints this reaction when she describes her response as a writer to Antarctica: ‘I fiercely wish I had no prior inkling of this place, that everything I'm looking at were completely new to me. I hate movies and TV and videos. People with cameras are busybodies, writers are control freaks, spoiling things for everyone else, colonising, taming, matching their egos against the unshowable, the unsayable. I long to have come down here in a state of infantile ignorance.'4 But the undeniable fact is that everybody does have a prior inkling of Antarctica, one that is always textually mediated. Not surprisingly, given my state of disciplinary paranoia, my dinner-table reply emphasised not these abstract musings but the concrete facts – I had lists of texts, I had numbers, I could answer this one confidently.
Barely had I composed my answer to this question when another came in its wake: ‘Why focus primarily on fiction, when there are so many incredible stories of real-life dramas in Antarctica? After all, most of the people who write literature about Antarctica have probably never been down there ...' Like many expeditioners, my interlocutor had read very widely in Antarctic exploration narratives. And she was right to ask her question: it's one that I've asked myself. The answer, ‘because I'm a literary critic' might have washed a few decades ago, but it hardly does now, when nonfiction genres such as travel writing and diaries are the topic of much interest within my field. It is true that the best-known Antarctic stories relate the actual experiences of early explorers: Douglas Mawson stumbling into base at the end of a disasterridden trek, starving and exhausted, only to see his expedition's relief ship sailing out of the bay; the ice inexorably crushing Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance; the wonderfully quixotic ‘Winter Journey' of Apsley Cherry-Garrard and companions, in search of an emperor penguin's egg; and the attempt on the pole by Robert F Scott and his four companions, with its terrible disappointments. These stories have held the popular imagination for close on a century; as narratives, they unquestionably deserve analysis in their own right.
Imaginative accounts also demand serious treatment, even – or perhaps mainly – when they have little grounding in lived experience of the continent. During one research trip to the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge I met a man – an Antarctic veteran – who, like me, collected Antarctic literature. He generously gave me access to his card catalogue, which included summaries and assessments of all the books he had read. They were divided into two piles: those texts which, in his opinion, accurately portrayed the continent, and those which did not. This categorisation made sense, given his interests, but it reminded me of how different my purposes were. For me, Antarctica's long-time inaccessibility to creative writers was liberating as well as limiting. It meant that attempts at realism were inevitably second-hand and derivative, reliant as they were on the accounts of explorers, whalers and sealers; but speculation was given free rein. The Antarctic continent in literature has abounded in creatures and phenomena that appear wonderful, terrible and ridiculous by turns: polar spirits; demon ships; vampires; routes to Mars; routes to Jupiter; routes to the interior of the Earth; enormous polar whirlpools; alien creatures buried in ice; the lost city of Atlantis; dinosaurs; giant lobsters; giant insects; and giant albino kangaroos. In my more Freudian moments, I like to think that this is the stuff the world produces when it dreams about Antarctica; and like dreams, it reveals as much about how we think of the continent as our sober, nonfictional accounts. The last few decades, when writers have been able to travel south as tourists or official interpreters, have seen the rise of comparatively realistic novels set in icebreakers or scientific stations – all of the expeditioners I talked to were familiar with Nikki Gemmell's Shiver. But some of the most interesting, and most insightful, recent literature of the Antarctic continues to be found in the utopian, science fiction or fantastic genres: Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica, Marie Darrieussecq's White, and Kevin Brockmeier's Brief History of the Dead
My dinner companions hadn't yet finished with me: ‘But isn't a lot of fiction set in the Antarctic complete dross?' There were two ways I could go here. One was to admit truthfully that Antarctica has attracted more than its fair share of hacks – that it has been the backdrop of endless formulaic lost-race romances, espionage thrillers, and horror-fantasies involving UFOs, Nazis, and citizens of Atlantis in equal measure; that it has produced a Mills and Boon novel, a Phantom comic and a Biggles book. And then to maintain that these texts are worth our attention – that to understand what image of Antarctica lies at the back of people's minds, its function within popular fiction genres is of paramount importance. The other way was to emphasise that alongside the hacks can be found a number of famous and well-respected names. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, H P Lovecraft, Vladimir Nabokov, Douglas Stewart, Thomas Keneally, Les Murray, Dorothy Porter, Ursula Le Guin, Beryl Bainbridge and Bill Manhire have all been drawn artistically (and, in some cases, physically) to the continent. Not wanting to start a debate about postmodern relativism and the decline of the education system, I gave the safe answer.
Then came the final question: ‘What have you concluded so far, then? How has Antarctica been portrayed by writers?' My stomach gave a flip that had less than usual to do with the constant roll of the ship. I'd been asked that question before, and my ability to answer it had decreased steadily as my reading had widened. If I'd had my wits about me, I might have repeated an anecdote I'd once heard about Leo Tolstoy. Asked what was the ‘meaning' of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy had replied that its meaning was exactly what he had written; that if he could have summarised it, he wouldn't have had to produce the novel. Of course, that reply would have been a bit rich coming from a literary critic, whose job is all about explaining how texts make meaning. But Anna Karenina is only one text (a long one, admittedly), whereas I was being asked to summarise, over dessert, several hundred novels, plays and films over the last two or more centuries. To do this would require a book – the one I was attempting to write.
My halting response was interrupted, mercifully, by an announcement on the PA system about an imminent helicopter safety briefing, and my companions scattered. But I continued to think about the conversation, and later that night in my cabin, looking over the small collection of Antarctic titles I'd brought with me, and perusing the notes I had taken on many others, I realised why I'd had so much trouble answering that final question, which was, after all, a perfectly reasonable one. Deep into my disciplinary ‘imposter' complex, I'd felt the need to give a twentyfive- words-or-less response: ‘Well, Antarctica has been portrayed like this.' But my research had not revealed any coherent single image of the continent; what I saw, more and more, was rather a cluster of patterns – interlocking, overlapping, contradictory. These patterns reflect the development of the mythologies, metaphors and motifs that have enabled writers to ‘speak' the continent in a way that science cannot.
One of these patterns, I realised, spoke directly to the ‘two cultures' mindset that was plaguing me. Misgivings about science in Antarctica are evident in literature well before the 1959 Antarctic Treaty officially sanctioned it as the legimitising activity in the continent. They stretch back to early literary engagements with the South Polar region, when what had for millennia remained an essentially mythological place began to be the subject of empirical investigation. Attempts to subject the region to cartographic and scientific survey produced literary responses that emphasised the ultimate futility of such attempts. While drawing on contemporary exploration accounts, nineteenth-century writers such as Coleridge and Poe treated Antarctica as a space of the imagination, where rationality reached its limits. Poe's short story ‘MS. Found in a Bottle', for example, starts by labouring its narrator's scientific outlook – he confesses a ‘strong relish for physical philosophy' and a ‘deficiency of imagination' – and ends with the same man on the brink of an enormous polar whirlpool, his scientific scepticism redundant in the face of the Antarctic enigmas he witnesses.5 In early twentieth-century stories, such as H P Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness and John W Campbell's short story ‘Who Goes There?' (later adapted twice for film as The Thing), scientists' hubris leads them to defrost alien creatures found in the Antarctic ice, which wreak predictable havoc on their bases and ultimately threaten the safety of the world. Although neither tale wholeheartedly condemns science, there is nonetheless a continuing sense that attempts to categorise or control the mysteries of the Antarctic region are misguided, and will lead only to greater destruction and bewilderment.
In the late twentieth century Antarctica continued to act as a favoured locale for narratives that asserted the limitations of current science and looked for something beyond established knowledge. The X-Files television series, featuring the polarised duo of Dana Scully, the scientific rationalist, and her more intuitive, less sceptical partner Fox Mulder, culminated in a feature film (also titled The X-Files and released in 1998) that saw both investigators head to the Antarctic. There, an unconscious Scully is held along with many other humans as a potential incubator for alien beings, in a facility under the ice that is finally revealed as an enormous spacecraft. In the concluding moments of the film, the alien ship bursts out of the ice, leaving Mulder on the brink of a massive chasm reminiscent of the South Polar abyss that confronts Poe's narrator. Scully the scientist remains unconscious, unaware of the enigmas that the continent continues to harbour.
It's hard to believe that Coleridge, Poe, Lovecraft, or Mulder for that matter, would have embraced the concept of an Antarctic ‘continent for science'; perhaps my feeling of disciplinary defensiveness was learned from my immersion in Antarctic literature and film? But, looking over my notes, I found evidence of the recent development of a countertradition. The last fifteen years or so have produced a number of literary texts that explore and embrace scientific concepts and methods. New Zealand poet Bill Manhire observes in the documentary of his Antarctic journey that ‘There seem to be some links between the way a writer or an artist might work, and the way a scientist might work. You get your information and you go away somewhere else and you process it' (Unframed Continent).6 The poems grouped together as ‘Antarctic Field Notes' in Manhire's Collected Poems bear out this view: a number of them engage, incidentally or centrally, with scientists at work. Elizabeth Arthur's novel Antarctic Navigation culminates in a ‘conversion' to scientific thinking. The narrator, who has been led by her stepfather to see science as a purely reductionist enterprise – ‘something terrible and petty' – comes to a new appreciation of the scientific outlook through her Antarctic experiences, eventually acknowledging science as her true ‘vocation'.7 And in Kim Stanley Robinson's near-future novel Antarctica, the values of science are integral to the nascent Antarctic utopia that the characters develop by the novel's end.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Manhire, Arthur and Robinson all visited Antarctica as writers-in-residence, sponsored (like me) by national programmes. Support of this kind for artists and writers has recently been enshrined within the Antarctic Treaty System. In 1996 the twentieth meeting of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties passed a resolution recommending the ‘[p]romotion of understanding and appreciation of the values of Antarctica, in particular its scientific, aesthetic and wilderness values' through educational activities and ‘the contribution of writers, artists and musicians'.8 I've always bristled somewhat at this wording, which seems to see the arts and humanities as providing public relations for the ‘continent for science' rather than investigating the myriad possibilities of what the continent could or should be for. But perhaps such a rubric is irrelevant, for the evidence thus far suggests that the bringing together of scientists and artists/ writers in Antarctica is more likely to bridge than widen any pre-existing ‘two cultures' hostilities.
All of this musing brought me back to my own voyage and my own
project. It struck me that the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) had far more faith in my nebulous, subjective discipline than I was currently showing myself. While the AAD's application process for the fellowships required a well-developed project, it recognised that my research would look very different from scientific research; that it would not involve concrete data collection or produce results that could be easily summarised. The AAD understood that the experience itself – not only the icebergs and the emperor penguins, but also dinner-time conversations in the mess – would inform and influence my work in intangible but essential ways. Even with this knowledge, I wasn't sure that I'd entirely worked through my misplaced sense of disciplinary inferiority. Part of me still longed for that white coat, something to smooth away ambiguities, just as the ice covered over Campbell's amorphous Thing. But I also knew that no real researcher – not even a cosmic-ray physicist – could access this magical coat. Hanging from a hook near the cabin door was my freezer suit, navy blue with large luminescent yellow sections to attract attention. It was a far better choice.
NOTES
1 Snow, C P, The Two Cultures: and A Second Look, Cambridge UP, 1963, p 4.
2 Pyne, Stephen, The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica, Ballantine Books, 1988, p 4.
3 Keneally, Thomas, 'Taking the Biscuit', Good Weekend, 10 May 2003, p 20.
4 Garner, Helen, 'Adrift in the Floating World', Good Weekend, 30 May 1998, p 18.
5 Poe, Edgar Allan, Selected Tales, Oxford UP, 1980, p 8.
6 Manhire, Bill, quoted in The Unframed Continent, DVD, Natural History New Zealand, 1999.
7 Arthur, Elizabeth, Antarctic Navigation, Bloomsbury, 2004, p 780.
8 Resolution and Measures adopted at the XX Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Annex A, Resolution II (1996), available courtesy of Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury, at
http://www.anta.canterbury.ac.nz/resources/treaty/meetings/xx-utrecht/p2annexa.html
ELIZABETH (ELLE) LEANE is a lecturer in the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania. In 2004, she was awarded an Antarctic Arts Fellowship by the Australian Antarctic Division. She is currently working on a book, provisionally entitled Fictions of the Far South: Antarctica in Literature. She maintains an online bibliography of texts relating to Antarctica in literature and culture. This can be accessed at
http://www.utas.edu.au/english/Representations_of_Antarctica/
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
Ph: (03) 6226 2325 Fax: (03) 6226 2172
E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au