Ashley Salter

March 2004

Stranger than Fiction: Verisimilitude and the Reality Effect
in Texts of Polar Exploration

            Genre can be a problematic term when discussing the literature of exploration.  High school English classes often teach a basic definition of genre.  This same definition is given, as Jane Ftacnik pointed out in her 2002 mid-term, in some literary dictionaries.  Genre, in simple terms, is a kind or type of writing.  But exploration literature draws attention to the many dimensions or multiple facets of genre, to the various ways that genre can be demarcated. 

            The Ice collection contains excerpts from memoirs, journals, essays, an interview, and a novel.  These categories are a common way of dividing literature into genres based on the form of the text. Alternately, genre can be determined by the nature of the plot or narrative.  Many works of exploration literature, for example, are Romances.  The readings for this course contain Romantic elements such as the Sublime and Gothic.  Most importantly, the Romantic convention of a quest or journey which drives the narrative is ever-present in exploration texts.  Exploration literature also encompasses both multi-voiced genres (novels and snatches of dialogue in other writings) as well as single voiced ones (poetry and journal). 

            Fiction and nonfiction distinctions are another way to separate writings by genre.  Our course reading list ranges from the purely fictional Pym and The Sparrow to the rigidly nonfiction accounts of Brainard, DeLong, and Scott.  However, several readings fall between these genre categories.  The (nonfiction) memoirs of Cherry-Garrard and Byrd employ fiction techniques such as flashback and dialogue.  Even the journals occasionally introduce snippets of conversation.  Bainbridge’s novel, The Birthday Boys, introduces another wrinkle into the attempt to iron out what is fiction and what is fact.  Her work is a fictionalized account of an actual event.  We could summarily categorize it as fiction, but this disregards much that differentiates it from the invented tale of Pym.  Interestingly, Poe originally tried to pass Pym off as a reconstructed record of real events, something akin to Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World.  Its form is, like The Birthday Boys, that of the novel.  And unlike either of those, Pym is decidedly fictional, an author-invented tale.

            Ftacnik’s essay demonstrates instances where multiple genres are present within a single piece of exploration literature.  She looks at genre overlap by examining the places where scientific data and personal opinion appear side-by-side in the literature of exploration.  I will also examine how genres become blurred in exploration texts, specifically how fiction and nonfiction intertwine.  My evidence will relate to the presence of verisimilitude and the reality effect.  A familiar adage tells us “Truth is stranger than fiction.”  The literature of polar exploration offers a chance to interrogate that assertion. 

            Exploration literature is perhaps best thought of on a continuum from purely fictional to purely nonfiction texts.  At one extreme lies Pym.  At the other end are the journals by Scott, DeLong, and Brainard.  In the middle are hybrid texts including Cherry-Garrard’s memoir and Bainbridge’s novelistic re-imagining of the Scott expedition.  These six texts differ, along the continuum, in form, narrative quality, depth of characterization, tone and language.  They also differ in the types and quantity of details included. 

            On the same continuum, I believe we can plot a transformation from verisimilitude (seeming to be true, having the appearance of reality) to the reality effect (the special urgency or intensity that occurs in a text about actual events).  The “pure” fiction of Pym should, by the assumptions of this constructed progression, sacrifice some verisimilitude for the sake of interesting narrative.  The records kept by Scott, DeLong, and Brainard I would expect to exhibit the greatest evidence of the reality effect, because they are “pure” nonfiction, little more than daily scraps of data strung together chronologically to make up a text.  Cherry-Garrard and Bainbridge render my hypothesized distinctions more complex, however.  Both authors recount factual events using, to lesser or greater extent, the tools of the fiction writer.  Their works, it seems, should contain the strongest elements of verisimilitude as well as some evidence of the reality effect.

            The most visible manner in which fictional and nonfiction exploration texts differ is in their structure.  The majority of Pym is narrative prose often containing long, elaborate sentences and lengthy passages delving into the psychological status of its characters or ruminating on the situation or the landscape.  Brainard, DeLong, and Scott do not indulge in such sentences or passages.  Their journals are comprised of pithy entries containing many clipped, staccato sentences and often slipping into a telegraphic style utilizing fragments to convey information in the fewest possible words.  Poe mimics this format in sections of Pym.  He writes, for example, “June 9^th.  Fine weather.  All hands employed in repairing bulwarks” (57).  In style, this approximates the entries of men who actually found themselves in life or death situations in the Antarctic, but he immediately returns to summarizing a series of conversations between Augustus and Peters. 

            The journals, I noticed, offer scant information about conversations that took place.  The emphasis is on what was done rather than what was said, because the parties’ actions were the only thing keeping them alive another day.  Poe gives himself away – as an armchair explorer, a writer visiting the Antarctic (or adrift at sea) only in his imagination – by allowing himself the luxuries of complex narrative, considerable dialogue, and extensive psychological probing.  He chooses the integrity of his Romance narrative over a structure which would convey greater verisimilitude.  Pym himself considers the journal form a way to quickly relate “events of the ensuing eight days [which] were of little importance, and had no direct bearing upon the main incidents of my narrative” (55). 

            Arguably, a novelist with a hyper-realistic style could write a tale like Pym in a manner that flawlessly mimics the structure and feel of expedition journals.  But Poe’s strengths as a writer are not in Realism but rather in the Romantic and the Gothic.  The high points of the novel are certainly not to be found in the mock-journal segments.  Pym’s stunning moments are Gothic moments.  The appearance of the ghost ship is one of these (81-3).  The incident stands out for sheer creepiness and the suspense Poe builds when the shipwrecked foursome think they are about to be saved – not for any creation of verisimilitude. 

            The fact that Poe chooses to end Pym with a series of journal entries is an apparent attempt to interject verisimilitude.  The reality effect is most powerful in the journals at the very end, particularly in accounts from parties who did not survive.  Scott, realizing that it will be his last entry, marks it as such and writes only “For God’s sake look after our people” (117).  This final plea is intense in its simplicity.  Scott’s ending is worlds different from Pym’s final dramatic gush: “And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us.  But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men.  And the hue of the skin of the figure was the perfect whiteness of snow” (175).  This ending also has intensity – a breathless, harried, dramatic intensity.  Again, it’s a Gothic moment at which Poe excels rather than a poised demonstration of understated verisimilitude.

            DeLong’s journal most strongly exhibits the reality effect.  It conveys the most urgency, elicits the most nail-biting concern for the men whose story it is.  Its ending is simpler even than Scott’s.  The journal contains no realization by its author that the text has been finished.  The entries dwindle and then stop, uncommented upon.  During the final week, DeLong barely notes the date and whether anyone died.  As a reader, I could only react by flipping back a page and rereading the final spare entries, slowly realizing that they represented the demise of the author and his entire group.  I experienced urgency unmatched in even Pym’s finest moments of Gothic suspense.

            Cherry-Garrard’s text resembles Pym in one matter of structure – the inclusion of only brief selections from the diary he kept during the journey.  Like Poe, he seems to value the fluidity of narrative, or evocation of the experience for readers, more than reproducing every precise detail of the weather conditions, the restricted menu, or the time spent marching.  Those are the type of details the journal keepers recorded.  Scott meticulously includes temperatures and the times they were taken.  DeLong records precise distance covered and the corresponding time intervals spent marching each bit of that distance.  Brainard never fails to share with the reader precisely how many pounds of shrimp he caught that day. 

            This gets at another differentiation of fiction and nonfiction exploration literature.  The journal writers are focused on quantifiable information and hard facts.  Nuggets of data make up most of their texts.    A few other observations are interspersed.  The other writers I have considered place no such primacy on data.  Cherry-Garrard weaves in facts and information so they enhance the story he is telling. He builds a sense of reality through these details.  For example, he includes an explanation of how their clothes freeze, locking them into whatever stance and angle of neck they happen to be in only a few minutes after emerging from the tent (66).  He evokes how cold it is by relating that “it was very difficult to splinter bits off the butter” (76).  He gives temperatures, distance marched, and specifics of their diet, but these are supporting material for his other thoughts.  He has the luxury of writing, not unlike Poe, in a warmer place at a time when his life is in no immediate danger.  He has an opportunity to reflect on his Antarctic journey, to remember and include more than grim details directly effecting death or survival.  “One of the joys of summer sledging,” he writes, “is that you can let your mind wander thousands of miles away for weeks and weeks” (70).  The journal keepers record seasonal differences in the surface of the snow or ice and the effect this has on sledging progress.  They sometimes comment on days that are pleasant or less bitter than others.  But I do not recall them remarking on the sheer joy of anything about their expeditions.

            The excerpts from Cherry-Garrard and Bainbridge both include flashbacks to events before the men in Scott’s party left Britain.  This allows for much deeper characterization than the journal writers had time to consider.  Bainbridge has her narrator, Titus Oates, reminisce at length about his home, his family, a birthday party, and a picture that used to hang on his wall (354-5).  Cherry-Garrard recalls the way in which he became a part of the Scott expedition and how his myopia almost excluded him (62).  These pre-Antarctic glimpses of Oates and Cherry-Garrard do much to illuminate their personalities and individual lives.  Bainbridge also accomplishes characterization by having Oates think of the future, of being rescued and heading homeward on a ship.  He intended to study for his major’s exam during the return voyage (359).  That is a personal insight unlikely to appear in the journals such as the ones kept by Scott, Brainard, and DeLong. 

            Poe, predictably, exerts considerable effort on characterization.  His novel begins with a chapter devoted to the drunken escape of Pym and Augustus.  They take a small boat out after a night of partying.  The relevance of this episode to the larger narrative lies in the fact that, as Pym comments, “It might be supposed that such a catastrophe as I have just related would have effectually cooled my incipient passion for the sea” (13).  Mostly, the incident illustrates that Pym and Augustus are young and impulsive and adventure-seeking.  It sets up what they do later, stowing Pym away in a cargo hold.  Poe also includes a glut of details, probably meant to resemble the factual data of nonfiction polar accounts.  Unfortunately his story bogs down in technicalities such as how ships behave in a gale (59-60) and the intricacies of proper stowage (52-3) without evoking the reality effect or convincing the reader this account is factual.

            Cherry-Garrard (and, maybe to a lesser extent, Bainbridge) seems to have achieved a near-perfect synthesis of factual story and fictional technique.  As Alvarez points out in his review, “A Magnificent Failure,” readers of The Last Journey in the World are fortunate that so widely read and articulate a person was among the surviving members of Scott’s party.  He crafted a narrative wherein we can observe the best results of both the reality effect and verisimilitude.  Cherry-Garrard seamlessly joins hard facts about freezing temperatures and frozen blisters with passages such as the opening of the Ice excerpt which shows the humor, whimsy, and humanity of the expedition’s members.  His narrative derives reality, intensity, and urgency from its status as nonfiction and the data pieces that identify it as nonfiction.  It derives depth, readability, and verisimilitude from the fiction writer’s methods he uses within it.  It’s an engaging mixture.  Truth may be stranger or more compelling than fiction, but Cherry-Garrard’s text suggests that the devices of fiction can improve on the truth.