Kelly E. Tumy

22 April 2002

 

The Development of the Narrative:  Physical and Psychological Responses in Tracks and The Worst Journey in the World.

Kelly E. Tumy

As any narrative develops, a close reader will look for clues to help decipher the murky waters of both concrete and abstract meanings within the layers of that particular text.  In the literature of exploration, the waters are even more muddied in that storytellers mix physical responses, taking both the characteristics of the concrete, psychological responses, and the characteristics of the abstract responses.  They do this so often that these responses begin to affect the narrative structure.  Two such pieces of exploration literature, Tracks by Robyn Davidson The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, embody this hypothesis in that both narratives differ from normal narrative pattern as they seek to explain both a physical and a psychological response to different types of exploration and ultimately to decipher their own narrative pattern.  These explorers’ experiences in the narratives they leave behind are the gifts they have already received for attempting the adventure in the first place

In Tracks, author and explorer Robyn Davidson crafts a decidedly concrete, but at the same time abstract, narrative through her interactions with three different natures: the two physical natures:  human nature of men like Kurt; different animal natures; and finally, the struggle with Mother Nature.  The physical struggles bring out the emotional side of her exploration of the Australian Outback, while her psychological struggles actually craft the tightly woven narrative she is struggling to create throughout this journey. 

As this story takes shape, she introduces a character that had a lasting physical impact on her and her journey.   She takes more care in describing how the barrenness in Kurt reflects the barrenness of the land she now finds herself in, and her story assumes an emotional quality as she connects these two seemingly opposite natures. She skillfully spends the first half of her book in physical struggles.  She has an inkling of why she has come to Alice Springs because, “there are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns—small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track” (Davidson 19).  At the outset of this pivotal moment in her life, she conveys the physical image of her life turning.  Her life has made this turn along with the narrative, and she turns her life toward Kurt, who is a physical, muscular struggle for Davidson.  “The preparation for the journey, which is described in the first half of the book, is not simply a long prelude;” instead it sets up the concrete, physical struggle that shapes her narrative (Robyn Davidson).

She sees Kurt for the first time and notes there is a “dry grumpiness about him that put [her] instantly in [her] place and made [her] feel like a complete idiot” (Davidson 25).  Her response to his dryness shapes the physical part of her narrative. Her attention to detail and emotion is highlighted each time she is around him as “[s]uddenly, Kurt appeared around the corner—an apparition in white taking giant strides.  I could feel his fury before he reached us and stood up to face him.  He pointed a shaking finger at my friend and hissed through clenched teeth…” (30-31), and the narrative takes on a different look as Davidson exposes the true nature of Kurt through these physical descriptions.  Kurt, at times, seems to have some redeeming qualities, but Davidson’s physical descriptions of him only bring emotions to the surface of his character for the reader.  When he gets physical with Davidson and physical with the camels, the emotions take over the story and Davidson gives a glimpse at another dimension to her journey: an emotional glimpse.  But Kurt is not the only person who evokes this emotional writing from Davidson.  As she struggles with the ups and downs of dealing with Kurt, she needs an emotional balance in her life and finds that in Kurt’s wife, Gladdy.  It is Gladdy she goes to to find comfort after Kurt whips the camels into submission.  Davidson also gets emotionally involved with Jenny and Toly as they help her start her expedition. 

This adventure though is not simply dominated by people.  Her beloved camels and her dog also take on the emotional quality of the physical struggle of her journey.  She even goes so far as to characterize her planned journey as “the lunatic idea” that was “basically to get myself the requisite number of wild camels from the bush and train them to carry my gear, then walk into and about the central desert area” (19-20).  And although this sounds like a logical plan, once she finally gets involved with the animals, her physical interaction begin to affect the narrative, again in an emotional way.  At the beginning of her journey, she is already entrenched in her feelings for her dog, Diggity.  But as she works with her camels and gets to know them, she becomes attached quickly and her narrative becomes more emotional.  She frets endlessly when they wander off, and she will spend hours lost in thought searching them out, all the while worrying about their safety of the open plains.  She becomes so emotionally involved with them she even “found that [she] was constantly projecting the images of the camels on to whatever I looked at for longer than three seconds” and everything she gets involved in reflects the emotions she now ties to the camels (43).

The truest nature of these emotions comes to the surface of the narrative when she has to put Katie down never “expecting the momentary wave of hysteria that swept over [her] then” (70).  But how could she not have expected it?  She spends seventy pages emotionally investing in people and surroundings only to be slaughtered by this loss. It is quite an ironic scene, though, in that she never expected to care this much—ironic in the fact that we knew it was coming all along, and she has no idea these emotions even exist.   But what rewards the reader are the subtle clues we get to see that she has left unwittingly in the narrative.  We know, at this point, that we will see the emotions well up through this physical contact and we follow the narrative more closely looking for clues.

Her reactions take on an even deeper quality as she ventures out on her own and, once in the environment, begins to shift the narrative from an emotional roller coaster to a psychologically driven narrative that concentrates on the pacing and the details of the narrative.  Once she is alone, her physical strain with the animals is still apparent, but she is able to come to grips with some of the more complex implications of her journey.  Once on her own, she recounts “eight unspeakable days of hell” (96) with her physical struggles with the camels and the saddles, all the while “living on one’s nerves and expecting every moment to produce a horrendous catastrophe” (97).  She tells the story more fluently, and we are more aware of her true aim:  a quest for independence in a male-dominated world.  She wants to prove she can complete an exploration herself, and do it with little help.  She does still need the help of many around her to succeed, but she drives her story along with personal, revealing details.  We see this when she thinks to herself, when she talks to herself and the camels on her trek, when she muses about lost loves and lost opportunities:  in short, when she is psychologically stimulated.

This psychological response to her struggles is Davidson at her best, crafting narrative at a calculated pace to reveal brief yet meaty glimpses into her own psychological journey.  This mode of writing helps her convey not only her physical struggle but also her mental struggle as well.  Fighting to find her individual voice, she ultimately finds, as she put is “a solid reliance on myself” and this is where the narrative forms a cohesive unit (Davidson 193).  Gone are the days of fighting with Kurt and Rick.  Long gone are her insecurities with the camels.  So, in actuality, gone are her physically emotional exchanges and heated arguments.  A more paced narrative, a more contemplative narrative, has replaced them all. 

Understanding her struggles from the first ten chapters—her pain and agony—we remember each loss, each mistreatment at the hands of unkind people.  With Davidson, however, we finally see that it was all  to show that “[h]er quest [has] become [a] sensitive combination of inner and outer voyaging” (Robyn Davidson).  She had to endure the physical to come out the other side of it and find her psyche in this expedition, this exploration.  For the narrative is not complete without both the psychological and the physical. 

Davidson, through a meticulously scrutinized doling out of facts, no longer merely exists, “what was once a thing that merely existed before, became something that everything else acted upon and had a relationship with and vice versa” (195).  And that is the true nature of the structuralism of psychology:  analyzing the consciousness into basic elements that people can understand. and this is how Davidson rounds out her narrative.

 

  “When this way of thinking became ordinary for [her]” she realizes this trip is the cure, the aid she needs to find her success again (ibid).  She communicates that success through her psychological triumphs:

With hard-nosed lack of self-delusion, the narrative chronicles the history of one person’s beliefs and the limits of her physical endurance.  Her life had scarcely prepared her for the circumstances she faced.  As she wrote in Tracks, ‘if you are fragmented and uncertain, it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt (Robyn Davidson).

And slowly, as her narrative begins to repeat its themes—the death of a dear animal, this time it is Diggity; re-found friendships—“Davidson discovers resources within herself that mirror the riches of the vast land she traverses. Davidson emerges as a heroine who combines sensitivity and extraordinary courage” (Traveler’s Tales…) and ends her well-developed narrative defiantly stating, “The trip was easy.  It was no more dangerous than crossing the street…[she learns] that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step and making the first decision (Davidson 254).

Not only is Robyn Davidson a shining example of this dual struggle, but in a completely different setting, in an, if you will, polar opposite, Apsley Cherry-Garrard in The Worst Journey in the World demonstrates the same type of narrative patterns, but with his own twists. Whereas Davidson allows herself to wax poetic in her psychological moments, Cherry-Garrard guards his narrative more closely.  And as physically strained as Davidson’s adventure is, it truly pales in comparison to the physical hardships that Cherry-Garrard endures.  It is his physical response to his adventure that introduces the same kind of emotion we saw in Davidson, just a different quality of emotion.  First there is the obvious gender difference, and as honest as Cherry-Garrard is about the physical portions of this rigorous exploration, he hides his emotions just below the surface.

As his narrative opens, we are assaulted by a chilling physical description of the land.  It is “a hard night:  clear, with a blue sky so deep that it looks bleak:  the stars are steel points” and even though this is just an excerpt from this long recollection, Cherry-Garrard has set this intense emotion with this first line (60).  He sees danger in this Antarctic sky and hides it just below the images.  His chosen task is to bring back the eggs of the Emperor penguin, but his attitude is not one of a hopeful, scientific fact-finding mission.  He has to recreate the exact nature of the severity of his physical surroundings so the reader can begin to understand his psychological motivation in his quest for scientific research data.

He has an immensely different task than did Davidson. Not just because their two terrains differ so greatly, but also because he is a scientist by nature and must therefore control his emotions much more carefully.  What he doesn’t realize is that these extreme physical situations bring his emotions to the surface of his narrative: 

I have met amusement with people who say, ‘Oh, we had minus fifty temperatures in Canada; they didn’t worry me’ or ‘I’ve been down to minus sixty something in Siberia.’  And then you find that they had nice dry clothing, a nice night’s sleep in a nice aired bed, and had just walked out after lunch for a few minutes form a nice warm hut or an overheated train.  And they look back upon it as an experience to be remembered.  Well of course, as an experience of cold, this can only be compared to eating vanilla ice with hot chocolate cream… (Cherry-Garrard 71)

His mere use of the placating adjectives nice—used four times, dry and just signal his frustration with people’s understanding of the degree of cold to which he and his party have become at least tolerant of if not accustomed to.  How difficult it is to communicate the emotions of “traveling for a month during the perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter, dragging their sledge after them in temperatures that often dipped to eighty degrees of frost” (Burnham).  But Cherry-Garrard does stow his emotional clues under his descriptions of these physical experiences.  He has to, for his narrative is a more scientific one in nature than was Davidson’s. 

His physical descriptions are more vivid than Davidson’s and at times more accurate.  Davidson’s physical interactions include both humans and animals.  These two factors keep the emotions boiling over into the narrative so much that she has to address them.  For Cherry-Garrard, it is the weather, the descriptions of extremes that he “lace[s] with humor, fortitude, and bitterness, an account of risk and misfortune” (Proulx).  Whereas Robyn Davidson wants her reader to feel her emotions, Apsley Cherry-Garrard is somewhat embarrassed that he lets them creep in.  This is the point where he pulls back to the comfort and crispness of science to find his footing again:

What is this venture?  Why the embryo of the Emperor penguin so important to Science (sic)?  And why would three sane and common-sense explorers be sledging away on a winter’s night to a Cape (sic)  which has only been visited before in daylight, and this with very great difficulty?

 

The Emperor penguin is a bird which cannot fly…(Cherry-Garrard 62-63).

The narrative creeps so closely to emotion and pulls itself back under the watchful eye of the storyteller.  He defends his choice to go after the eggs with that spark of emotion in his rhetorical questions:  What?  Why?  Why?  Why are three sane men doing this?  The tension mounts underneath these questions as Cherry-Garrard slips back to his comfortable descriptions of the bird’s flight habits.  He sees himself getting too emotionally involved, and if he is emotionally involved, then what happens to his research?  He deftly pulls himself back to this scientific realm where he finds more comfort, just like Davidson, crafting narrative at a calculated pace to reveal brief yet meaty glimpses into his own psychological journey

            But just like the trek across the Australian Outback, Cherry-Garrard concentrates the first part of his narrative excerpt in the physical/emotional venue.  He is forever trapped “on the unremitting waste of the Rosse Ice Shelf” (Burnham) with Scott’s body tied up with the emotions still fresh in his mind of finding his friend’s frozen corpse.  He, too, though, propels his narrative through his psychological musings once he has exhausted his physical and emotional tête-à-tête with his reader..

            Once at Cape Crozier and ensconced in his loveable shelter, he finds some hope in this impossible situation.  “Altogether, things looked very hopeful when we turned in to the tent…the view from eight hundred feet was magnificent” (89).  He sees hope for the future of this expedition.  Recording this after the tragedies that befell many in his exploration party, he still propels his narrative through these short, psychologically stimulating events.  And although these are later recollections, he recounts them with little bias and slant and shows a true psychological growth.  He even once mutters “God!  What a place!” through which he acknowledges yet a deeper aspect of his psyche.

            In this place he finds his true psychological joy:  the eggs of the Emperor penguin.  Although he does not succeed in his initial task as we would like to have seen, he turns small failures into his own kind of success.  The eggs are no longer the prize.  For in their breaking on the return trip, he believes “the grease in the eggs did them [his mitts] good” (98).  What could have been taken as a failure is instead a psychological push to get him back to the base camp and more importantly, through his narrative.

            A fitting, summative end, Cherry-Garrard leaves us with the same kind of hopeful words as Davidson does, “But this I know.  We on this journey were already beginning to think of death as a friend.  As we groped our way back that night, sleepless, icy, and dog-tired in the dark and wind and the drift, a crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift” (99).  His crevasse is a literal one here but can be interpreted as a figurative one and applied to Davidson as well.  Both had their extremes with which to cope and both were worse off after they began their journeys, at least they were physically.  But, these two explorers in these pieces of non-fiction find themselves in various narrative structures indicative of their own experience, yet still “in the midst of a natural world that threatens to engulf [them]” (Lenz 33).  They choose not to let nature or their own minds engulf them.  They rise to the forefront of their narratives, command them into submission and, in the process, see those crevasses as a gif.  Those crevasses are the rewards and punishments for attempting the adventure in the first place.  And the gifts then become the narratives themselves.

Works Cited

Burnham, David.  “Cooling Memories.”  <http://www.history.org.uk/PDFS/Cooling>  18 April 2002.

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.

Davidson, Robyn.  Tracks.  New York:  Vintage Books, 1980.

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

Proulx, E. Annie. “Cold Comfort.”  The Washington Post. December 2000, sec, Book World.  

Robyn Davidson.  Contemporary Authors.  Gale Literary Databases.   <http://p26688.uhcl.edu.2061> 4 April 2002.

Traveler’s Tales: Publishers of Stories, Wit and Wisdom from Travelers Around the World)  Traveler’s Tales. <http://www.travelerstales.com/news/biblio2.html>  15 April 2002.