[Anonymous]

The Sublime in Exploration Literature

The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms defines the sublime as “that quality in a literary work that elevate the reader to a higher plane.  Most writers have sought to achieve sublimity through a grand style or nobility of sentiment or subject.”[1]  The term sublime derives from a first century Greek work in which it was defined as great thoughts and noble sentiments combined with factors such as diction and arrangement to produce something beautiful.  In the eighteenth century Edmund Burke revised this definition to include the distinction that while beauty was a limited, mundane emotion, the sublime was infinite and more powerful.  He also argued that the sublime must utilize terror in its evocation of beauty.[2]  Burke writes that “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible…is a source of the sublime.”[3]  He goes on to write that death, even more terrifying than pain, may be closely associated with the sublime and that while qualities of the sublime may overlap with qualities of beauty, the sublime requires something greater.[4]  Several years later, Kant explored the topic in Critique on Judgment.  He admitted that “the beautiful and the sublime are similar in some respects.”  Kant writes that the sublime is accompanied by seriousness rather than a light appreciation for the superior form of an object or landscape.[5]       

Part of the appeal of the literature of exploration is due to the extremes of beauty and despair, both of the physical landscape and of the explorer’s emotional make up, that are revealed.  The sublime can be considered a characteristic of both literature and nature, although the arctic literature considered in this essay is more concerned with describing the sublime in nature than in achieving the effect itself.  Several of the works describing Arctic exploration tackle the idea of the sublime in nature and also in the nobility of the human subject.  Facing the prospect of a long, painful death at nearly every turn in the harsh, unexplored environment, the arctic explorers had a plentiful supply of material to produce sublime moments.

In “The Worst Journey In the World,” Apsley Cherry-Garrard recounts his journey to collect the eggs of the Emperor Penguin.  He describes the aweseome beauty before him on the night before he starts off on his side trip:

 

 “…a blue sky so deep that it looks black: the stars are steels points: the glaciers burnished silver…The ice is cracking to the falling temperatures and…over all, wave upon wave, fold upon fold, there hands the curtain of the aurora.  As you watch it, it fades away, and then quite suddenly a great beam flashes up and rushes to the zenith, an arch of palest green and orange, a tail of flaming gold.  Again it falls, fading away into great searchlight beams which rise behind the smoking crater of Mount Erebus.”[6]

 

Although Cherry-Garrard is about to embark on a dangerous journey, or perhaps because he is aware of the danger to him, he appreciates the landscape on a spiritual level, invoking God’s hand in creating the sight before him.  Later, once the cold and hardship have become a greater reality, Cherry-Garrard once again notes the beauty of the aurora and even halts, along with his comrades, to appreciate the awe-inspiring vision.  Cherry-Garrard also memorably describes a view a few weeks into the journey which gives credence to Kant’s statement that “That is sublime in comparison to which everything else is small.”[7]

 

“The view from eight hundred feet up the mountain was magnificent…To the east was a great field of pressure ridges below, looking in the moonlight as if giants had been ploughing with ploughs which made furrows fifty or sixty feet deep: these ran right up to the Barrier edge, and beyond was the frozen Ross Sea, lying flat, white and peaceful as though such things as blizzards were unknown…Behind us Mount Terror on which we stood, and over all the grey limitless Barrier seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague and ponderous, a  breeding-place of wind and drift and darkness. God! What a place!”

 

Though his narrative is active and avoids excessive repetition of detail, Cherry-Garrard still manages to convey the extraordinary hardship his party endured.  The temperature regularly dipped into the –50s and the their hope of reaching the penguins was diminishing daily.[8]   The men made slow, painful progress on frostbitten feet; even getting into their sleeping bags at night proved arduous. Not long after they had departed the men had endured so much they began “to think of death as a friend”[9] The presence of this pain and hardship is an essential part of the sublime.  Without it, the landscape would have been simply pretty.  Kant wrote that beauty could exist independently of the observer, while certain conditions within the observer had to be created to achieve the sublime.[10]  Certainly, the necessary pain and desperation existed within Cherry-Garrard and his party to create an opportunity for the sublime to exist. 

In addition, to the sublime they found in the land, the men of “The Worst Journey in the World” also discovered a kind of gruesome nobility in their fellow man.  The combination of beauty and pain combined to create remarkable acts from the men, such as when Bill insisted on helping the others with the difficult task of entering their frozen sleeping bags, leaving him with no assistance.[11]  Cherry-Garrard comments again and again on the noble behavior of his companions in the trying circumstances. 

Other examples of the sublime can be found throughout the hardship described by the explorers.  In the excerpt from “Six Came Back” David Brainard describes Lt. Adolphus Greely’s team’s desperate wait for rescue.  Nearly every journal entry recounts the meager food rations and discouraging tasks of shrimping and hunting.  Amidst the starvation and suffering, Brainard notices “the brass buttons on Lieut. Lockwood’s blouse, worn bright by the flying gravel.”[12]  Although he is starving and his thoughts revolve around his suffering and how to acquire any bits of food for his party, the “dazzling buttons” transport Brainard to happier times as well as bringing back the acute pain of his friend’s death.  Amidst the drudgery and death, the shiny objects are at once beautiful and morbid.  Though themselves small, the emotions they evoke make the buttons no less potent than the awesome cliffs Cherry-Garrard describes. 

On June 4th, Several days after spotting the buttons and even deeper in his despair, Brainard notes “A beautiful day.”  His only elaboration on this statement is a description of the wind speeds.  What beauty he saw in those days of death can only be imagined.  In the same entry he refers to the beauty of Smith Sound, which “is a beautiful sheet of water today…as smooth as a mirror.” [13]  Brainard manages to appreciate his surroundings in spite, and maybe because, of his precarious situation.  He also recognizes the character of the men, who use their little remaining strength to attempt to give the deceased proper burials.  The horror of having to bury so many combines with the goodness of most of the men to provide a moving account.

Scott himself describes a day in the middle of his ill-fated voyage as “beautiful day—too beautiful.”[14]  His men are not making adequate progress and the conditions are wearing them down.  The very elements that contribute to their failure must also seem beautiful—in this case, the ice crystals on the surface.  Nature is destroying the men with its small, beautiful creations.  Perhaps the most memorable elements of Scott’s journals are the instances of the sublime found in human nature.  He describes Oates perseverance and good cheer in the face of increasingly degenerative health problems.  Oates does not complain through his pain, not wanting to add to the burden of his teammates.  Although Oates is the ”greatest handicap” in their progress, the other men unfailingly cheer him on and selflessly attend to him.[15]  The gruesomeness of his good spirit becomes clear when Oates deliberately leaves the relative comfort of a tent to stumble to his death in a blizzard.  His appalling death combines elements of horror and bravery to provide an example of the sublime as present in human nature. 

In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe, a master of horror and beauty, skillfully sketches out moments of the sublime.  He describes the agony Pym experiences after being “entombed alive” in a fissure as

 

 “The blackness of darkness which envelops the victim, the terrific oppression of the lungs…unite with the ghastly considerations that we are beyond the remotest confines of hope, and that such is the allotted portion of the dead, to carry into the human heart a degree of appalling horror an awe not to be tolerated-never to be conceived.”[16]

 

Poe invokes the idea that the sublime is difficult to describe, rare to experience and accompanied by danger.  Although it involves danger and pain, the danger may be an exhilarating respite from the more mundane varieties danger and pain.  This passage also supports Burke’s assertion that though the sublime and the beautiful may exist together, the sublime need not contain elements of beauty, as we usually understand it.[17]  Because Pym is rarely “beyond the remotest confines of hope,” this episode only generates excitement and exhilaration on both the readers and the characters.

            Upon escaping the fissure, Pym’s party is confronted with a gorge “entirely filled up with the chaotic ruins of more than a million tons of earth”[18] and the knowledge that they “were the only living white men upon the island.”[19]  The horror of the realization that the rest of the party has perished, along with the spectacle of the gorge, combines to create a terrible, yet awesome moment.  Poe goes on to describe the ultimate sublime moment in Pym, the end of the journey.  Although what lay beyond could only be guessed, the “gigantic curtain” that covered the entire horizon and the “cataract”  in which “At intervals there were visible…a chaos of flitting and indistinct images, there came rushing and mighty, but soundless winds, tearing up unkindled ocean in their course.”[20]

            Poe’s accounts of the sublime are exciting and awesome, but they ring false when compared to the non-fiction accounts.  The journals describe fleeting moments of the sublime amidst unbearable drudgery and pain, while Poe describes awesome event after awesome event in meticulous detail.  The impact of such moments is diminished when they are place among other riveting, typical adventure tales, rather than the realistic descriptions of starvation and frostbite in the non-fiction exploration accounts.

In Beryl Bainbridge’s fictionalized account of Scott’s expedition, the sublime appears again.  In the middle of a conversation about “nature study excursions” and “Greeks and their notions of tragedies” a character speaks that “the ‘joy of being’ incorporates a delight in annihilation.”[21]  The characters recognize, as did their real counterparts, the thrill of danger and the beauty that can be seen only when such danger, and even death, is near.  Though this characterization of the “joy of being” strikes the narrator as strange, a certain pleasure is found in experiencing that which is almost indescribable in its mix of pain and wonder.  Kant writes about the sublime that “even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate.”[22]

Later in Bainbridge’s piece, a character writes of a friend’s death and suddenly launches into a gloomy, but lovely description of his surroundings.  “We’d started in a wretched wind, pulling the skis in a horrible light that threw fantastic shadows across the snow…all glittering back-cloths and eerie pockets of stagy darkness.  As far as I could tell the world was a coffin and the lid of the sky was about to nail me down.”[23]  The vivid, frightening imagery evokes Burke’s idea that the sublime “ought to be dark and gloomy.” While beauty was left to be “light and delicate” the sublime “ought to be solid, even massive.”[24]  The sublime feeling in this case is certainly massive, inundating the character with a feeling of entrapment.

Almost as suddenly as the character begins his moment of reflection he ends, moving on to the topic of gangrenous feet.  In this aspect, the fiction imitates the non-fiction closely.  Both Bainbridge’s piece and the non-fiction pieces build up to the moments of sublime experience in similar ways. Because such moments often appear suddenly in the middle of hardship and then disappear, they have a surreal, almost fictional quality, allowing them fit easily into both genres when handled properly.

Sheila Nickerson writes in “The Arctic in Literature” that:

“This is the dark/brilliant, sharp/misty world of the midnight sun and the sunless months; the world of the aurora borealis and the fata morgana.  Here icebergs tower and nonexistent mountains appear to block passage.  The moon and sun wear halos and the eyes are quickly blinded by light.  Mirage invites and destroy.”

 

With this kind of imagery, the explorers had ample time to observe the harsh beauty of the arctic. However, when reading the accounts, the horror of the expeditions stands out more than any other characteristic. Why these men would take such risks and how they remained brave in the face of so much hardship are the questions that remain with the reader.  It is precisely this agony that made experiencing the sublime possible for the explorers.  Without the horror and suffering, they would not have experienced the indescribable, awesome moments of the sublime that the rest of the world can only imagine.