Antarctica, Art and Archive

Polly Gould

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350158344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Antarctica, that icy wasteland and extreme environment at the ends of the earth, was - at the beginning of the 20th century - the last frontier of Victorian imperialism, a territory subjected to heroic and sometimes desperate exploration. Now, at the start of the 21st century, Antarctica is the vulnerable landscape behind iconic images of climate change. In this genre-crossing narrative Gould takes us on a journey to the South Pole, through art and archive. Through the life and tragic death of Edward Wilson, polar explorer, doctor, scientist and artist, and his watercolours, and through the work of a pioneer of modern anthropology and opponent of scientific racism, Franz Boas, Gould exposes the legacies of colonialism and racial and gendered identities of the time. Antarctica, the White Continent, far from being a blank - and white - canvas, is revealed to be full of colour. Gould argues that the medium matters and that the practices of observation in art, anthropology and science determine how we see and what we know. Stories of exploration and open-air watercolour painting, of weather experiments and ethnographic collecting, of evolution and extinction, are interwoven to raise important questions for our times. Revisiting Antarctica through the archive becomes the urgent endeavour to imagine an inhabitable planetary future.

1

Elsewhere

The Crippetts

This book is written in the light of the moment in history, in the early twentieth century, when geographical exploration took a turn; at the end of what historical geographer Felix Driver refers to as “Geography Militant”.¹ According to Driver, “[t]he romance of exploration led inexorably to disenchantment”, in that after the entire surface of the globe had been discovered there followed “the irreversible closure of the epoch of open spaces, the end of an era of unashamed heroism”.²

Attaining the South Pole seemed to bring this ultimate and final elsewhere within the scope of the “here”. This book is written in a world after that time, in which there is no more elsewhere. Driver points out that these types of tale of nostalgic longing are recurrent.³ The attainment of the South Pole is one episode in a continuing history of turns, but it is the one that is the focus of my inquiry here. My aim is to shift Driver’s historical geography of the exploration of elsewhere into elsewhere as a refractive method for interpreting the archive of heroic Antarctic exploration.

Edward Adrian Wilson was born in 1872 into a middle-class doctor’s family in Cheltenham. He travelled with the two British Antarctic Expeditions, Discovery (1901–4) and Terra Nova (1910–13). An accomplished watercolor artist, naturalist and doctor, he was the second expedition’s Chief of Science. In setting out in 1912 on the southern journey to the pole, Wilson and his party anticipated the attainment of the last major prize of exploration of global territory, but they arrived too late. The closing chapter of Wilson’s life, his death with Scott on their return trek after their failed attempt to be first to the South Pole, has become, in so many accounts, the defining moment of his biography. Although many of the best stories end badly, with the absolute closure of death and in accordance with the vision of subject as an individual, the narrative I wish to construct in this book will not be told in that biographical mode. Rather it questions, as Adriana Cavarero calls it, “the desire for unity, which gets doubly satisfied by death—whether as the final chapter of the tale, or as the summarizing gaze that watches the story”.⁴ My narrative here, following Rosi Braidotti, aims to remove the “horizon of death”.⁵ Braidotti’s writing on transposition, and Sigmund Freud’s Entstellung, a method of dream interpretation he invented, are drawn together in my book to create my process of refraction, which aims to produce another interpretation of Antarctica through the archive of Wilson’s watercolors.

The following anecdote of self-analysis that Freud provided as he approached his own death as horizon is relevant to Wilson’s story as I engage with it here.⁶ Nearing what he expected to be the end of his life, Freud wrote an open letter to his friend and correspondent Romain Rolland titled “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis”.⁷ Freud introduced the letter by saying that he offered it as a gift, but from one who “has seen better days”, likening himself to the ruin that furnished him with the experience he narrates. He begins with the image of the heroic explorer:

When first one catches sight of the sea, crosses the ocean and experiences as realities cities and lands which for so long had been distant, unattainable things of desire—one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness.⁸

He was forty-eight years old at the time of this experience and recalled the deep-felt ambition he had as a child and young man to travel, but with little opportunity for its realization. Freud recalls here the unattainable lure of travel that had represented to him the possibility of transcending the limitations of the impoverished horizons of his childhood and youth, and the feeling of incredulity that such a place as Athens should ever be available to him—not that it did not exist, but that it could not exist for him.

Yet when Freud encountered the unexpected opportunity to travel to Athens and see the Acropolis, he was first struck with depression in anticipation of his departure on the last leg of his journey. Freud interprets an underlying process at work:

“What I see here is not real”. Such a feeling is known as a “feeling of derealization”[Entfremdungsgefühl]. I made an attempt to ward that feeling off, and I succeeded, at the cost of making a false pronouncement about the past.⁹

Freud goes on to make a relation between the negative refusal of facts experienced in derealization and what he calls their “positive counterparts”—such as “déjà vu”.¹⁰ Freud explains that derealizations have a “dependence upon the past”, and that his own incident illustrates this “disturbance of memory and falsification of the past”:¹¹

It is not true that in my school days I ever doubted whether I should see Athens. It seemed to me to be beyond the realm of possibility that I should travel so far—that I should “go such a long way”.¹²

Freud describes a double-sided response, which he characterizes as produced by a divided person within himself—one responding “as though he were obliged, under the impact of unequivocal observation, to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful”,¹³ the other surprised at the disbelief of the first. Freud asserts that “incredulity of this kind is obviously an attempt to repudiate a piece of reality”.¹⁴

Although “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” does not recount a dream, Freud treats it as though it were a kind of dream and applies to it his methods of dream interpretation, including Entstellung, in order to interpret the latent content underlying the manifest content of the memory-experience. Pertinent to my inquiry here are Freud’s understandings of disturbances to observation, and the methods he supplies to comprehend what is at play in the disavowal, and denial, of observable facts when one cannot or will not believe one’s eyes—whether what one sees is hoped for (déjà vu) or feared (derealization). Also pertinent is the process of “falsification of the past” of which Freud gives an account. It is this attentiveness to Freud’s insights into observation and the recollection of the past that I bring to the archive of Wilson’s watercolors and the historical context of his life.

The first chapter of Wilson’s biography, titled “The Crippetts and Elsewhere”, recounts the part of his boyhood spent in the farm in the Cotswold Hills near Leckhampton, Gloucestershire:

It is one of those still unspoiled corners, even in these days, of the Cotswold Hills, where birds can build unmolested, and wild flowers bloom, and creatures burrow and roam.¹⁵

There, in the English countryside, he developed his passion for collecting natural history specimens, which has been linked to his enthusiasm for making “patient and accurate delineation of them in form and color”.¹⁶ A pencil drawing dated 1895 and titled The Crippetts illustrates both Wilson’s naturalistic drawing skills and the pastoral charm of this place (Fig. 1.1).

A few years later, in 1899–1900, he wrote with nostalgia of an era before the immense changes wrought by Victorian industrialization and about feeling somewhat at odds with his own time:

Oh, think what England’s country was one hundred years ago. I always feel as though I belong really to a century ago in all my likings: I don’t feel built at all for to-day’s bustle and push and railways and breech-loaders.¹⁷

In the above quotation Wilson’s nostalgia for an earlier time is a temporal displacement. So, too, is there a temporal displacement in my understanding of “No more elsewhere”. In this phrase the spatial relation to what is not “here”, that is elsewhere, is combined with a temporal relation to “no more”. What is “no more” is the epoch of global exploration, epitomized and culminating in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, which took place around the last few years of the nineteenth and the first few decades of the twentieth century. In this writing, the time of Wilson’s biography and the historical context in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Prologue
• 1 Elsewhere
• 2 Watercolor
• 3 Antarctica through the Archive
• 4 The Color of Water
• 5 Where Else
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright