The Polar Silence

[rj]

Scott Badger <lupine at ncia.net>:
> 
> I keep wondering what Pynchon means here.  One thing explorers like Franklin
> and Andree found was death most horrible - death from from scurvy,
> starvation and exposure in staggering numbers.  Their explorations were
> marked by an almost pathological refusal to even consider the methods of the
> natives that allowed them to not only survive, but even thrive.  For almost
> two hundred years, polar attempts repeatedly failed because the food,
> clothing, means of transportation and shelter that the Europeans doggedly
> attempted to apply to the arctic were wholly inappropriate.  It wasn't until
> nearly the turn of this century that explorers like Nansen, Amundsen, Peary
> and Cook began to "succeed" by adopting the way of the Eskimos rather than
> their own, supposedly superior, technologies.

Cook? Not James Cook, surely, who sailed around the Pacific in the 1760s
and 1770s?

I think that the point is that "exploration" and "discovery" and
planting flags and taking photos are all part and parcel of the white
colonial illusion. They are attempts to claim possession of, or dominion
over, Nature, in perpetuity -- attempts to defy human mortality in other
words -- and that when these explorers "succeed" and return the truth of
our human mortality is concealed, put aside, whitened over, while we
celebrate and adore.

It is when these explorers nobly succumb to their deaths that the true
lesson is learnt. White man's had it wrong all along.

best

>Another Narrator:
>"There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys
>taken northward on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes,
>to the final walls of ice. Our judgement lapsed, fatally: we paid more
>attention to the Pearys and Nansens who returned -- and worse, we named
>what they did "success", though they failed. Because they came back,
>back to fame, to praise, they failed. We only wept for Sir John Franklin
>and Salomon Andree: mourned their cairns and bones, and missed among >the
poor frozen rubbish the announcements of their victory. By the time we
>had the technology to make such voyages easy, we had long worded over
>all ability to know victory or defeat.
>     What did Andree find in the polar silence? What should we have
>heard?" (589)