The Polar Regions in Literature: From Frankenstein to Beryl Bainbridge
For the last two centuries and more, the polar regions have not been just geographical areas awaiting discovery by intrepid explorers; they have also been spaces in which poets and novelists have allowed their imaginations to travel. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818, the very year that Ross’s first expedition in search of the Northwest Passage departed, the North Pole is a place of emptiness and desolation to which the Monster departs to face its death. Twenty years earlier, the southern ocean had been the setting in which Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner brings a curse upon himself when he kills the albatross. Since that era, many other writers have found inspiration in the white spaces of the world.
The Franklin expedition, with its story of suffering and endurance and the continuing questions marks over the exact fate of the men of the Erebus and Terror, stirred the imaginations of many writers in the Victorian era. As we have seen, Dickens was fascinated by it and, although he did not feature it in his fiction, he published a long article ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’ in his magazine Household Words. He was also the prime mover behind the staging of a play by his close friend Wilkie Collins which very obviously draws upon the Franklin expedition for its plot. The Frozen Deep, a story of heroic self-sacrifice during a voyage in search of the Northwest Passage, was given a number of well-publicised amateur performances in the 1850s, including one attended by Queen Victoria. Dickens not only rewrote parts of the play and encouraged Collins to re-jig its plot to emphasise the heroism of its central character Richard Wardour, he also played Wardour himself. The central character in Jules Verne’s The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, the leader of a British expedition to the North Pole, carries echoes of Sir John Franklin.
Nor is the Franklin expedition an exclusively nineteenth-century obsession. It has been the subject of a surprising number of modern novels. In The Broken Lands, first published in 1992, Robert Edric avoids indulging in the twenty-twenty vision of historical hindsight. He doesn’t delight in exposing feet of clay or highlight hypocrisies with a knowing irony. The heroism of Franklin and his men, although seen from a perspective unavailable to the explorer’s contemporaries, is not radically undermined. Instead we see men gradually destroyed by their own, necessarily, blinkered assumptions about the world and by an unforgiving natural environment in which the moral values of the society from which they come cannot save them. The ice which traps them and the landscape in which they make their harrowing and ultimately futile journey back towards civilisation are brilliantly evoked in a book which follows, with convincing psychological realism, their inexorable decline. The German novelist Sten Nadolny’s The Discovery of Slowness, published in the previous decade, is a strange but satisfying reconstruction of Franklin’s life and the explorer features in William Vollman’s epic novel The Rifles. Rudy Wiebe’s prize-winning Canadian novel A Discovery of Strangers focuses on one of Franklin’s expeditions from the 1820s. There is even a contemporary horror novel by Dan Simmons (The Terror) in which Franklin and his men are stalked across the Arctic ice by a monster drawn from Inuit mythology.
Other novelists have drawn on the Franklin search expeditions to create their fiction. One of the central characters in Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal owes a lot to real explorers like Elisha Kent Kane. Steven Heighton’s Afterlands is the story of another imaginary expedition, this one from the 1870s, which echoes those that really took place.
In The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, Christoph Ransmayr cleverly weaves together two stories – one of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition of 1872–74 and the other of a contemporary Italian whose obsession with it takes him north – to create a fascinating and unsettling novel. Wayne Johnston’s The Navigator of New York is a Canadian novel which focuses on Robert Peary and Frederick Cook and the controversies surrounding their conflicting claims to be first at the North Pole. And, of course, there have long been thrillers set in the Arctic, of which Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra, first published in 1963, still remains one of the most famous.
Like the Arctic, Antarctica has proved to be a vast white space on which writers have been able to project their imaginings. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first to do so. In his only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the eponymous hero is driven ever further south, through shipwreck, mutiny and encounters with the black natives of a polar land, towards a mystical encounter at the South Pole with which the book abruptly ends. Other writers, most of them influenced by Poe, found their imaginations as stirred as his by thoughts of the bleak wonders and potential mysteries to be encountered in the Far South. Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery (1897) is explicitly a sequel to Poe’s work. William Clark Russell, largely forgotten today, was a well-known writer of maritime fiction in Victorian England. (Sherlock Holmes’s companion, Dr Watson, is reading a novel by Russell at the beginning of one of Conan Doyle’s short stories about the great detective.) Russell’s book The Frozen Pirate (1887) is the story of a shipwrecked American sailor who drifts ever further south on an iceberg and eventually comes across a pirate ship frozen in the ice many years earlier. Another forgotten writer, James De Mille, imagined a lush southern land populated by extinct creatures in A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder published in 1888 and, in the 1890s, Antarctica became a favourite location for writers of the ‘lost world’ fiction that was popular at the time.
Poe is an obvious influence on HP Lovecraft but the horror writer of the 1920s and 1930s was equally clearly thinking of Richard Byrd’s flights across the Antarctic continent when he produced At the Mountains of Madness. Originally written in 1931, when Byrd was front-page news, although not published until 1936, Lovecraft’s novella recounts the story of an expedition to Antarctica which stumbles across the relics of an alien civilisation so appalling and unearthly that members of the expedition are driven mad by what they see of it. Lovecraft was not alone in his fascination with the Far South. The pages of American pulp magazines of the thirties and forties are filled with stories in which Antarctica is populated with everything from lost Neanderthals to the survivors of Atlantis. Apart from At the Mountains of Madness, probably the best of these is John W Campbell’s classic novella Who Goes There? which first appeared in Astounding Stories in 1938. The basis for John Carpenter’s film The Thing, the story is set on a remote research station in Antarctica.
In science fiction, the interest in the region has continued to the present day, although the narratives have certainly grown more sophisticated. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica, for example, is a thriller about the threats to the continent in a near future where environmentalists and multinational companies have very different views about its potential.
Just as writers in recent years have been fascinated by Franklin and his fellow Arctic voyagers, so others have found inspiration in the great stories of Antarctic exploration. Thomas Keneally has twice written novels in which the central character is a man looking back on his experiences in the Antarctic many years earlier. In The Survivor the protagonist remembers a disastrous expedition in which the leader lost his life; Victim of the Aurora is a clever murder mystery set against the backdrop of a fictional expedition in 1909, as recollected by one of the participants. One of the late Beryl Bainbridge’s finest novels is The Birthday Boys, which looks at Scott’s last expedition from the perspectives of several of those involved in it and the Terra Nova expedition is also the subject of a very different novel – Robert Ryan’s Death on the Ice. The Ice-Cold Heaven by the German novelist Mirko Bonné provides an account of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition as seen by the real-life teenage stowaway Perce Blackborow, cunningly disguised in the novel as Merce Blackboro.
The Polar Regions in the Visual Arts
Some of the most telling and evocative images of the Arctic and the Antarctic were created by those who travelled to the polar regions themselves. In the nineteenth century, many naval officers, particularly those trained as cartographers, were skilled as draughtsmen and watercolour painters and some of those who travelled to the Far South and the Far North recorded what they saw. George Back was particularly gifted as an artist. Others who painted or drew what they had seen with particular success included Samuel Gurney Cresswell, who served in the Arctic under James Clark Ross and Robert McClure, and a midshipman with the appropriate name of Horatio Nelson Head whose sketch of the two ships on Parry’s third voyage dwarfed by towering cliffs of ice is one of the most evocative Arctic images of the whole nineteenth century.
Professional artists too began to respond to what they had heard or read of the Arctic. The German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich produced Das Eismeer (‘The Sea of Ice’) in the 1820s. The Arctic became a regular motif in the paintings of a wide range of nineteenth-century painters. The Icebergs by the American painter Frederic Church, like the vistas of Niagara Falls for which he was already famous, was originally intended to be a scene of sublime nature untouched by human presence. When it was displayed in London in 1863, he painted in the broken mast of a ship, a hint of sailors lost like Franklin’s men in the icy wastes. The following year, one of Victoria’s favourite painters, Edwin Landseer, exhibited Man Proposes, God Disposes, a canvas on which one polar bear tears at the sails of a wrecked ship while another has the rib of a skeletal mariner in its mouth. The reference to the Franklin expedition is clear. Other great names in Victorian art were also drawn to the subject
John Millais’s The North-West Passage, painted in 1874 just before the Nares expedition sailed, made only oblique reference to Franklin and those others who had been lost in the Arctic in its depiction of a grizzled seafarer, at home with his daughter, but clearly daydreaming (or having waking nightmares) of his past experiences amidst the ice. At least one well-known painter – the American William Bradford – became a traveller in the Far North himself, making several trips to Labrador and Greenland in the 1860s and bringing back material to help him in the creation of his Arctic landscapes. On one of them, he was accompanied by Isaac Israel Hayes who had his own terrifying memories of the ice and snow from previous journeys.
As the nineteenth century went on, photography became increasingly more sophisticated in both its artistry and its technology and the expeditions of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration nearly all employed an official photographer. Herbert Ponting, already well-known as a photographer producing images of exotic places for London magazines, travelled on Scott’s Terra Nova expedition; Frank Hurley was an Australian who accompanied both Mawson and Shackleton on expeditions. Both produced some of the most iconic images of the Antarctic ever committed to film. The Heroic Age also coincided with the beginnings of documentary film-making and images of men struggling against the elements in icy landscapes made stirring viewing for stay-at-home audiences. Hurley took a movie camera with him on Mawson’s expedition of 1911–14 and on Shackleton’s ill-fated Endurance expedition. His films Home of the Blizzard (1913) and South (1919) emerged from the footage he shot. They were the first in a succession of distinguished documentaries which, over the decades, brought the polar wilderness before the eyes of cinema audiences around the world. The Great White Silence of 1924 made use of footage and photographs shot by Ponting on the Terra Nova expedition. It was not a great success on its first release but it was restored and re-released as recently as 2011 to much acclaim and enthusiasm. In the sound era, Ponting produced Ninety Degrees South (1933) which thrilled those who saw it. With Byrd at the South Pole came out in 1930, advertised in breathless, almost disbelieving tones as ‘Actually filmed in the vast unknown of the Antarctic’, and won an Academy Award for best cinematography.
Fictional films about the polar regions began to appear in the 1930s. Frank Capra’s Dirigible from 1931 stars Fay Wray, later to be the subject of King Kong’s infatuation, in a story of pilots competing to reach the South Pole and (incidentally) for the love of Miss Wray’s character. 1933 saw an American/German co-production entitled SOS Iceberg/SOS Eisberg, an example of cinematic co-operation that was to be rapidly brought to a halt by the rise of the Nazis. (Ironically, one of the film’s German stars, Leni Riefenstahl, was to become Hitler’s favourite movie director.) Footage from it was later used in a Universal B-movie entitled Mutiny in the Arctic. There were even polar cartoons. Walt Disney Studios produced an early but inventive Silly Symphony entitled Arctic Antics (1930) which has polar bears, walruses and some badly-lost penguins dancing across ice floes and snow-covered landscapes. Ideas about the North and the South Pole, even if some of them were wrong ones, were now firmly embedded in popular culture.
In Britain, Scott of the Antarctic, produced at Ealing in 1948, stuck very firmly to the heroic narrative that had been established in the previous thirty-six years. It was only in 1985 that a revisionist version of the story, written by the left-wing playwright Trevor Griffiths and based on Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen, was produced. The seven-part TV drama The Last Place on Earth, starring Martin Shaw as Scott and Sverre Anker Ousdal as Amundsen, was as scathing in its portrayal of Scott as the biography on which it was based. The Red Tent, with Peter Finch as Umberto Nobile and Sean Connery as Amundsen, was an international co-production from 1969 which told its own version, not always historically accurate, of the polar journey of the airship Italia and its crash.
In recent cinema and television, virtually every genre of movie has its examples of polar stories. There are documentaries by the dozen but there are also feature-length cartoons (Happy Feet and its sequel), thrillers (The Last Winter), TV science fiction series and children’s films. And, of course, there are horror movies. By the 1950s, both the Arctic and the Antarctic were amongst the most popular places from which monsters emerged in schlock films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and the trend has continued to the present day. From vampires enjoying the long periods of darkness (30 Days of Night) to Nazi zombies (the Norwegian film Dead Snow), strange and terrifying creatures emerge out of the white wildernesses that we still do not feel we fully understand.