Refusing history at the end of the Earth: Ursula Le Guin's "Sur" and the 2000-01 women's Antarctica crossing

Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 99-121

  Glasberg, Elena ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 51849140869     PISSN: 07327730     EISSN: 19361645     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/4149218     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Ever since Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in December 1911, followed closely by Robert Falcon Scott of Britain, the race to stake out geographical claims in the Antarctic has remained steady. Edmund Hillary and Vivian Fuchs used mechanical means to cross the continent in 1958, while Reinhold Messner was first to ski solo across Antarctica in 1990. It is within this context that this most recent crossing must be placed. American Ann Bancroft and Norwegian Liv Arnesen became the first women to cross the Antarctic continent in a mechanically unaided trek. They began their attempt October 2000, reached the South Pole on 16 January 2001, and ended their adventure on 18 February 2001. Bancroft and Arnesen, veterans of previous polar expeditions, had funding from corporations such as Volvo, Motorola, and Pfizer and returned to much major media attention, appearing on Good Morning America and NBC's Nightly News, to name just two. Every aspect of their journey had been tracked by a sophisticated website (www.yourexpedition.com). Their expedition actually came short of its goals (they had to abandon efforts 500 miles short of their original goal), even while two Norwegian men (Eirik Sonneland and Rolf Bae), trekking at the same time as the women's team, made the entire continental traverse, but without the elaborate communication organization. For more information on the adventure aspects of the crossing and comparisons to other crossing endeavors, see John Howard, "The Southern Traverse," in Adventure, May/June 2001, pp. 31-32.
2. The exploration of Antarctica predates Greek civilization and continues to this day. Voyages by Polynesians or other civilizations in the south oceans beyond what is now the Antarctic circle have been conjectural, based on the probabilities of small vessel expeditions. However, no material evidence of these voyages exists. The Greeks documented their conception of terrae australis incognita, or the unknown lands to the south, in treatises and maps, projecting onto the globe a large southern landmass to balance the known lands of the northern hemisphere. But it was not until Captain James Cook's second voyage in 1772 that any European knowledge of the region was actually recorded. Cook passed through a warm southern ocean into increasingly frigid southern latitudes toward the pole where he was finally stopped by ice (and the threat of mutiny). He declared the ice unpassable and the land that might lay beyond as worthless. Despite such harsh judgment, British, French, Russian, and U.S. expeditions explored farther south throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the broadest geographical outlines of the continent were filled in by 1914, and overflights of the 1920s to the 1940s revealed much of the interior of the land, exploration of the terrain continues to this day. Antarctica remains the largest and least known of the earth's landmasses. Histories of Antarctic exploration are quintessentially patriarchal, a point of view, one might argue, central to Le Guin's meaning in "Sur." Major works of Antarctic exploration history include Robert Kirwan, The White Road (London: Hollis and Carter, 1959);
3. Norman Kemp, The Conquest of the Antarctic (New York: Wingate, 1956);
4. Walker Chapman, The Loneliest Continent (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society Publishers, Ltd., 1964);
5. Roland Huntsford, The Last Place on Earth (New York: Atheneum, 1986). For a quick source of Antarctic history, geographic features, and current environmental data that is less focused on the "heroic" past
6. see Jeff Rubin, The Lonely Planet Travel Survival Kit (Oakland, California: Lonely Planet Publications, 1996).
7. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), on the "continental turn" in geography in conjunction with the modernist aspiration to totalization or the move toward a rational, interconnected, and hierarchicalized world knowledge. For the idea of modernity and space and time
8. see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). For the idea of the social mapping or creation of continents within the mapped globe
9. see Martin W Lewis, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, ed. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
10. Antarctic literary fantasy runs coextensive with scientific exploration, usually feeding off published exploration narrative. For example, Edgar Allan Poe, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), used contemporary interest in U.S.-led exploration of the Antarctic by the Wilkes Expedition of 1828-32 to concoct his own hoax vision of the South Pole.
11. See Fauno Cordes, "A Bibliographic Tour of Antarctic Fiction," AB Bookman Weekly, 82, No. 21 (21 November 1988), 2029-36, for a chronological list of Antarctic fiction; and my "Antarcticas of the Imagination" (Diss. Indiana University 1995) for U.S. Antarctic fiction. For a broad treatment of cultural and literary criticism of polar exploration
12. see Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996). Spufford is the only critic to engage a feminist reading of polar imagery in canonical British fiction, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1819), or to consider the gendered significance of Lady Franklin, the wife of the lost polar explorer Sir John Franklin, whose arctic expedition tragedy transfixed Britain from the 1840s to 1854.
13. Two works primarily focusing on Antarctic landscape, aesthetics, and poetry are William Lenz, The Poetics of the Antarctic: A Study in Nineteenth-Century American Cultural Perceptions (New York and London: Garland, 1995)
14. and Paul Simpson-Housley, Antarctica: Exploration, Perception, Metaphor (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Until recently the tradition of Antarctic fiction included neither non-northern Europeans nor women authors.
15. Although the Scott expeditions were bad exploration, they make a good story. Books and articles on Scott outnumber those on Amundsen by at least three-to-one. In the realm of fiction the attention continues to go to Scott's tragic expedition. The figure of Scott has become linked with modern south polar imaginings from the "white road" passage in T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1929)
16. to Crispin Kitto, Antarctica Cookbook (New York, St. Martins Press, 1984), in which an L. A. man escapes into fantasies of living in Scott's hut on the Antarctic cape. Almost all the films and videos on the history of Antarctica devote disproportionate attention to Scott's expeditions.
17. With such recent and popular offerings as Beryl Bainbridge's Birthday Boys (New York: Duckworth, 1991), an imaginative retelling of Scott's last expedition, it is clear that Anglo-American interest in the saga has not yet waned. For a discussion of British mythologizing of Scott
18. see Peter J. Beck, "The Legend of Captain Scott 75 Years After," Polar Review, Summer 1985, pp. 604-19.
19. Robert Falcon Scott, The Diaries of Captain Robert Scott: A Record of the Second Antarctic Expedition 1910-1912, Vol. VI (Tylers Green, Buckinghamshire, England: University Microfilms Ltd., 1968), entry for 17 January 1912. Subsequent references to dated entries will be cited parenthetically in the text.
20. For a careful and complex presentation of recent discussions within academic feminism of the critique of a white, liberal imposition onto feminist foundational narratives, see Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), especially chapter six, "The Alchemy of Disloyalty."
21. Ursula Le Guin, "Sur," in The Compass Rose: Short Stories (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 255. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
22. Le Guin writes in the tradition of Antarctic hoax in which an anonymous author/explorer presents a tale of a marvelous discovery that (1) cannot be scientifically either proved or disproved or (2) presents an alternate view or unknown history of the event, most often through the discovery of a "lost" manuscript. Some examples are Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)
23. Charles Romyn Dake, A Strange Discovery (1887)
24. James DeMille, A Narrative Found in a Copper Cylinder (1899)
25. and H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1936).
26. Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1913). Subsequent references to The Voyage of the Discovery will be cited parenthetically in the text.
27. See Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 207.
28. Susan Gubar, in "'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," Critical Inquiry, 8, No. 2 (1981), 243-63, offers a detailed and persuasive understanding of the long history of the imagery linking blankness and female endeavor/creativity/corporeality. Initially noting that the male artist has tried to usurp female potency through myths of male creation in order to "evade" the "humiliation . . . of acknowledging that it is he who is really created out of and from the female body" (p. 243), Gubar goes on to describe the difficulty the woman artist (or, in this case, the explorer) has in trying to join a tradition of specifically male creativity and endeavor that equates pen with penis and insists that women be either passive receptacles of male genius, muses to male creativity, or works of art in themselves - the central metaphor of the "blank page."
29. Le Guin is referencing artifacts of exploration history with which her readers are likely to be familiar. Both the Scott and Shackleton huts have been preserved and refurbished for national pride and the Antarctic tourist trade. The huts are treated almost like shrines to which visitors make a pilgrimage. Photographs of the huts, of their contents, and even of the men of the original Scott and Shackleton expeditions have been widely available since all early expeditions took along their own photographers. See especially Herbert Ponting, The Great White South (1921; London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1999).
30. The ozone hole is arguably among the best-known features of the Antarctic in the popular imagination. Evidence of a hole opening in the ozone above the south polar region was first found by a team of atmospheric scientists led by Dr. Susan Solomon, work for which she was recognized with the U.S. National Medal of Science. Solomon has moved from her association with the ozone hole phenomenon to entering the Scott-Amundsen debates. Using her training in atmospherics, Solomon has recently published a defense of Scott's methods and leadership skills, arguing that his failure was due to unusual weather patterns and not to bungling, as many others had maintained. See her The Coldest March: Scott's Fatal Antarctic Expedition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). Although the latest scientific evidence shows that the ozone hole is closing somewhat, the crisis of the environment in Antarctica remains one of the defining features of the region and one that plays a central role in present and future governance.
31. See Myra Jehlen, "Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism," Signs, 6, No.4 (1981), 575-601, for an early and important articulation of the problem of critiquing history from a position necessatily within history. The debate, roughly drawn, between poststructuralist and traditional scholars continues within the disciplines. For a good discussion of the "poststructuralist turn," see Michelle Barrett and Ann Phillips, eds., Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debate (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
32. For an example of feminist debate over such terms as "evidence, " "experience," and "the body," see Kathleen Canning, "History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience," Signs, 19, No. 2 (1994), 368-401.
33. Feminism, like other discourses, has had to become aware of the problem of its historical complicity with first-world imperialism. Specifically, "in supporting the agendas of modernity, therefore, feminists misrecognize and fail to resist Western hegemonies," in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., "Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity," in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 2-3.
34. Gyan Prakash, "The Impossibility of Subaltern History," Nepantla: Views from South, 1, No. 2 (2000), 287. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
35. The major source on Shackleton as hero and leader of men is Roland Huntsford, Shackleton (New York: Atheneum, 1986).
36. See also F. A. Worseley, Shackleton's Boat Journey (New York: Norton, 1997), and of course the story as told by Shackleton himself in South. The story of Shackleton leading his men to survive for two years in the sub-Antarctic regions has been taken up at several levels of popular culture. The New York Museum of Natural History mounted an exhibition of Shackletonia in 1999; George Butler directed two 2001 documentaries: The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition and a shorter IMAX version, Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure. Both films are unabashed hagiographies of Shackleton the man and leader of men. The BBC produced and broadcast a mini-series, Shackleton, directed by Charles Sturridge and starring the noted actor Kenneth Branagh in January 2001. Rumor is that a Hollywood feature film on the expedition and rescue is underway. A business-oriented publication, Shackleton's Way, ed. Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell (London: Nicholas-Brcaley, 2001), proposes Shackleton as an exemplary manager of men from whom contemporary business people have much to learn. All attest that the present is a moment of nostalgia and re-remembering of this disaster. Focus on Shackleton's managerial success has allowed Anglophiles for whom Scott's loss to Amundsen in the race to the pole has never sat right to promote another British explorer - who did not achieve the pole, but at least did not die trying - above Amundsen.