Kelly E. Tumy
24 February 2002

Characters of Exploration Literature: 

Products of the Environments, Engulfed in the Genre

Characters from various pieces of exploration literature interact differently with nature, so differently in fact that the lines between fiction and non-fiction begin to blur.  Difficult to distinguish in many of the pieces studied thus far, the genre qualities of each cross over almost seamlessly in Nancy Mitford’s A Bad Time, then remain as distinct as they can in Apsley Cherry-Garrad’s The Worst Journey in the World, Francis Spufford’s I May Be Some Time, and in Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym.  But all four of these pieces will work on the reader to shift traditional analysis of the genres.  Probably the truest example of pure genre comes from Apsely Cherry-Garrard’s account, but even in this public and private diary recollection, Cherry-Garrard still has moments of beautifully moving, almost fictional prose. While the genres do converge in the above narratives, the unifying thread becomes the domineering role of nature and her effect on the characters of real life and fiction.  Characters in both fiction and non-fiction find themselves in various narrative structures indicative of their own genres yet still “in the midst of a natural world that threatens to engulf [them]” (Lenz 33). 

But what happens to the characters throughout each of these pieces?  In some of the more non-fiction pieces we get only a single thread of a larger pattern of their lives—we are missing the whole story.  But then the fictional side of your reasoning kicks in and we imagine what could have happened to them:  enter Nancy Mitford and her non-traditional form of non-fiction.

Although Nancy Mitford depicts Scott as engulfed by his surroundings, her treatment of the event through her own brand of non-fiction genre qualities softens the intensity of the Scott expedition.    She begins her narrative with the data of the Scott journey but then blurs it with her own commentary of interest in the story that goes beyond a mere recording of people and events. Her story mirrors the mind of Scott the scientist as her characters are “on the deck of a fearfully overloaded ship” being cast about in the rough seas before arriving at McMurdo Sound (Mitford 44).  The characters are then engulfed by the stunning beauty of the scenery and are affected deeply.  The scenes move Scott to poetic lapses in his own diaries and Cherry-Garrard to sympathetic musings of the emperor penguins’ plight.   But what Mitford does so skillfully is recount their story, yet not get too emotionally involved so that she tips over the edge emotionally.  Yes, she does share her tears at the end, but she also shares this as an event she has revisited more than once but just feels she has to put her own words to.  She is involved in the non-fiction but with her own fictional ways, and her involvement finds her characters engulfed in nature for where else would someone want to read about them. 

We do not receive from her the story of the “boat ride” from New Zealand or the rigors of setting up camp.  Why?  Because in the realm of fiction, she will need a rising action and a falling action to complete her story yet she will hide this under the guise of non-fiction, thus portraying and incredibly skillful blend of the fictional and non-fictional elements of prose.  She gives her reader “dark winter months” and describes the events as “the most appalling nightmare possible to imagine,” almost a play on Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s title of his memoirs, and we clearly see how the arctic has swallowed up Scott, his men, and his hope (50).  Mitford clearly uses the scientific mind of Scott here to continue the thread of a piece of non-fiction that is part of that larger pattern.

That larger pattern is up to use to imagine, including almost subconsciously the elements of fiction for most readers are those fiction-lovers at heart.  These exploration literature authors simply feed our hunger for fiction.

 There is so much more to this story than Mitford lets on in her initial recollections, but she stays true to here genre by reporting the facts of the expedition and keeping the detail suppressed so that her reader has a clearer picture of the real event.  As if she has not tried to pull herself back from the facts and details already, she succumbs in her narrative every once in a while and gets swept away by her own narrative.

Scott exclaims “Great God!  This is an awful place,” and is almost engulfed spiritually by the horrific nature that surrounds him.  Cherry-Garrard looks at the emperor penguins and muses that they “look like little sad men…and were taken by early explorers for human natives” (49). Mitford is lost in the emotion of her narrative and no longer worries about her objectivity.  She wants her readers to feel their pain, their longing, their heartache; and they take on a more fictional quality here.  Surely this is only the pain of which stories could be concocted.  No one is this desperate, this determined except a fictional character in a novel or short story.  But the problematic term here is characters, for Mitford did not invent these people; they actually existed.   Mitford’s blend of the two genres shows not only her knowledge of the characters and their reactions to nature, but also her creation of the mindset of the fictional characters she unfolds to her readers.  Whether real or imagined, both the fictional and non-fictional Scotts and Cherry-Garrard’s present to the reader a problematic issue:  are the events real and can the narrative be trusted?  If they are, then of Scott and Cherry-Garrard, one or both will most assuredly meet death at the end of the non-fiction piece for no one can survive the narrative as Mitford has woven it.  But Cherry-Garrard does survive—a most fictional quality in that the supposed under-achiever, the 98-pound weakling, turns out to be the one to survive the great cold—not the great explorer Scott.  Who could have created a more triumphant yet poignant story?  Only someone with the skill to blend both the fiction and the non-fiction.

Moving from the blend of fiction and non-fiction, Apsley Cherry-Garrard gives a complete factual account of the Scott adventure, yet his story mirrors Mitford’s in that it contains this stunning blend that engulfs his characters as well. Again that term:  characters.  How can they be characters if they actually existed?  But can we not imagine the scene as Cherry-Garrard jumps into his narrative with “a blue sky so deep that is look[ed] black:  stars [were] steel points:  the glaciers burnished silver” (Cherry-Garrard 60)?  We see a fictional setting and characters emotionally engulfed by their surroundings and ask ourselves:  are they real, or are they fictitious?  Although two separate genres with their own distinct qualities, characterization seems to be the seam that binds the two genres together.  In fiction, we live vicariously through the adventures on the pages, and similarly, in these exploration pieces, the characters live almost fictional lives.  What happens to them does not seem possible and therefore has a fiction-like quality.  Maybe that then is indicative of the Exploration Literature:  it is non-fiction, but the stories are so surreal, so mind-boggling, that the reader gets caught up in what he or she perceives to be a fantasy world, but it is actually a reality.

Not only do the characters take on the fictional qualities, the setting engulfs the reader in its tale as well.  As Cherry-Garrard spins his yarn for his reader, he admits “generally we steered by Jupiter, and I never see him now without recalling his friendship in those days” (68).  We wonder what kind of adventure these characters are about to embark upon and what will befall them; although, we have already had the Mitford piece and others to tell us the true story.  This fact however does not keep us from believing in the narrative quality of Cherry-Garrard’s non-fiction.  We are right beside him as we are with fictional characters wondering “—75.8º, and I will not pretend that it did not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice below the circles of fire” (76).  We can envision the circles purgatory and picture our characters in this sad predicament. The seesaw comes back, and we know this is a true story with horrific outcomes for real people.  How is it that in telling the story, we see the characters and not the real people?  Is it because we have so much on record from the Scott exploration that we are able to pick and choose what we take as truth and what we take as fiction?

No piece is a better example of this dilemma than the Francis Spufford piece.  Spufford’s piece seesaws between personal account and fictional story telling. It is his assessment of the characters’ beliefs, motives, and behaviors and what the editor of Ice calls “the fundamentals and the details that matter in men’s lives” (286).  If these are the “true fundamentals” then why does this piece read as an engaging fictional piece?  Spufford’s blend of cultural studies with non-fiction creates a truly readable piece of non-fiction that waxes poetic at times.  He almost becomes a part of the narrative himself  “Out of the rolling storm, into the rigid pack-ice; at a snail’s pace through the tricksy lanes between the floes where the Adélie penguins squark ‘a guttural Aha or Wahah’ at the sight of humans, and grow most excited” (Spufford 295).  What is so surprising about this description is that it is the narrator’s commentary, not Scott’s or Cherry-Garrard’s.  The writer’s mind forces itself to the surface, not the scientist’s, and Spufford is so immersed in the narrative.  His blend has become the ultimate success, for where does the non-fiction end and the fiction begin?  It is once again a seamless garment with no stray threads.  This piece accomplishes the exact same outcome as The Worst Journey in the World, except that Spufford relies on the narrative to stir up sympathies:  the metaphor, the figurative language.  Cherry-Garrard relies on the sheer terror of the truth:  “fifty degrees of frost” and “[carrying] on their work as though the conventions of day and night did not exist” (Cherry-Garrard 64).

Perhaps the most astute at balancing the real and the unreal, especially in relation to character, is Poe.  Although his novel Arthur Gordon Pym has an inconsistent narrative at times, this can be overlooked because Pym is the character that Lenz set up as his archetype:  Pym is “in the midst of a natural world that threatens to engulf him” and this natural world reaches new heights under Poe’s pen (Lenz 33).

Pym takes on both fictional and non-fictional qualities and wears each mantle skillfully, the entire narrative comprised of the character consumed by his natural world.  Cherry-Garrard had times of revelry and good humor and could pull back from nature and the narrative—a more non-fiction-like quality; Mitford can take a step back out of her narrative for an objective look at the Scott expedition, and Spufford shares the same luxury as Mitford.  Poe, by the sheer nature of the novel genre, cannot withdraw his character form the story or even step back to comment on the experience.  It is here in Pym we see a completely different narrative take shape.

This narrative is truer to the fiction genre and more dependable than the other pieces.  Although much of the “adventure” side of the story can be attributed to Poe and his love of extremes, there is nonetheless a fictional character experiencing:

A triple horror of that spectacle?  Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction.  We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel! Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help (Poe 81).

And only the fictional character would “dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued…devour[ing] the rest of the body, piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth” (Poe 94). This glut of detail is the signal to the reader that fiction dominates this narrative and is now the most perfect example of what Lenz intended in his article:  to show how the narrative engulfs the character and at the same time, the character is engulfed by his natural surroundings.

  Although the main character may reflect the real Poe, addicted to adventure on the high seas and prone to “extreme language” and heights of emotion, Pym is “utterly benumbed” by his adventure on the Ariel and tells the reader it would be “hardly possible to conceive the extremity of my terror” (Poe 7), therefore exhibiting the fictional qualities of a character.  The reader sees the elements of the real Poe in these statements but would not see the real Poe staggering drunk into an unknown port.  These statements are reflective of the knowledgeable, scientific mind of Poe who crafted his short stories and more importantly, this novel.  Poe crafts with such skill a character we lose ourselves in and live vicariously through.  His writer’s voice takes over and his main character, Pym, reacts so shockingly to nature that nature has no choice but to simply swallow him up. 

People want to read about the ghastly idea of dead bodies floating in the water and the possibility of cannibalism, but they by no means want it to be real by any stretch of the imagination.

All four writers work to blend their genres, some more successfully than others, but all four treat their participants as characters in a fictional story.  So is this then indicative of Exploration Literature?  These authors have worked to blend genre identity, all the while engulfing their “characters” in the natural world of their surroundings.  The genre of exploration literature seems to lend itself naturally to the genre switching style of these writers.  What they do however, is keep the most recognizable literary element:  the character at the forefront of their writing and place him in perilous situations that could have been a possibility or could scare us so much that we are forced to believe they are works of fiction.  Either way, these authors cross the genre lines successfully to change their own writing and theme paradigms, and present these characters in a burgeoning genre through their skillful blends of style.

Works Cited

Cherry-Garrard, Apsley.  from The Worst Journey in the World.  Ice:  Stories of Survival From Polar Exploration.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999.  59-100.

Lenz, William E.  “Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym and the Narrative Techniques of Antarctic Gothic.”  CEA Critic. 53:3.  Spring/Summer 1991.  30-38.

Mitford, Nancy.  A Bad Time.  Ice:  Stories of Survival From Polar Exploration.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999.  43-58.

Poe, Edgar Allan.  Arthur Gordon Pym.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998.

Spufford, Francis.  I May Be Some Time.  Ice:  Stories of Survival From Polar Exploration.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999.  285-326.