Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Imagining Antarctica
The general public views of Antarctica are either of a continent for science or
of a snowy waste of little use to anyone, but threatening the world if it melts.
Slowly but surely, a wider range of perceptions are growing that see the continent
as a part of our culture and arts, stimulating an increasing interest from humanities
scholars,
fiction writers and visual artists.
Although the Antarctic has no native people, indeed no permanent population,
the very idea of this polar place has excited the imagination for centuries. The early
speculation on a yet-to-be found southern land where Utopia awaited the discoverer
had certainly begun by 1605 whilst the growth of the
theory in the
eighteenth century proposed the Pole as a key point of entry. Edgar Allan Poe was a
hollow-earth enthusiast and it is his
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
in 1838 that is the most famous of these topics and perhaps the
'
hollow earth
'
first important
Antarctic
fiction. For many readers Poe was writing a form of science
fiction, a genre
s
An Antarctic Mystery
, whose
storyline harks back to the death of Arthur Pym in the earlier novel. In his later and
more famous novel
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
Captain Nemo
first really developed for the Antarctic in Jules Verne
'
s
submarine, the
Nautilus
, visits Antarctica and after sailing beneath the ice surfaces to
discover an open polar sea. There have been several other science
'
fiction writers
since but the most outstanding is Kim Stanley Robinson whose novel
Antarctica
looks at McMurdo Station in a future world as global change alters
all the environmental parameters.
Antarctic poetry is largely a more recent phenomenon, although many will
recognise the early contribution of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his
Rime of the
Ancient Mariner
:
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came
floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken
-
The ice was all between.
Both Scott and Shackleton made a point of taking poetry to the Antarctic with
them
s was Browning. There
is poetry and verse of various sorts in some of the explorers
-
Scott
'
s favourite was Tennyson whilst Shackleton
'
diaries and in their
mid-winter magazine
Aurora Australis
. Whilst much of it is uninspiring there
are occasional gems. One by Frank Debenham, a geologist with Scott, was written
much later (1956) but carries real conviction and mixes religion with the human
emotions.
'
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