The Wide White Page

[Dave Monroe]

Review: The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine
Antarctica
11 November 2004
Reviewed by KIM GRIGGS

Antarctica has long existed in the imagination. The
ancient Greeks decided that there had to be a
counterweight to the Arctic, and so its opposite was
named the Antarctic.

Nowadays, the Antarctic is not quite so imaginary:
Lonely Planet has produced a guidebook. But the
remoteness of the coldest, driest and windiest place
on Earth means that Antarctica has mostly been the
preserve of scientists, heroic explorers and the
occasional travel writer.

Bill Manhire, in editing the anthology The Wide White
Page, offers another Antarctica: the Antarctic that
writers imagine. 

His selection eschews, in the main, non-fiction and
the work of writers who have been to Antarctica.
Rather, we are offered a journey through centuries and
genres, from Dante's account of Ulysses' last ocean
voyage, to Ursula Le Guin's story of South American
women who made it to the Pole first, to Monty Python's
skit about Scott of the Sahara.

We are also treated to the mysterious end of Edgar
Allan Poe's first book-length work of prose fiction,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The
next entry, An Antarctic Mystery by Jules Verne,
provides one possible solution to Poe's mystery.
Another gem is the story by German poet and short
story writer Georg Heym, translated especially for
this anthology, of a trio of South Pole explorers who,
unlike Ernest Shackleton, decide to carry on to the
Pole when they know they have no hope of making it
back.

Manhire does include some writers who know Antarctica
through experience, but avoids the obvious choices.
The diary entry of Robert Falcon Scott is one that
evokes small details of Antarctic life rather than the
drama and sadness of the Englishman's better-known
final entries. Modern-day visitors are also included:
Manhire has selected two works by local poet Chris
Orsman, one of New Zealand's first Artists to
Antarctica. 

Manhire ends the anthology with his own Visiting Mr
Shackleton, a hilarious collection of comments he
found in the visitors' book at Shackleton's hut at
Cape Royds.

Tempting those uninitiated into the fascinations of
Antarctica is the stunning cover, the pale blue edge
of the Barne Glacier. Inside, though, the images are
again those of the imagination. 

A Gawrey Extended for Flight portrays a flying woman
who appears in a 1751 novel by Robert Paltock.
Paltock's hero, sailor Peter Wilkins, meets and
marries his Gawrey, a woman whose wings can also be
handily reconfigured to enable her to float. Equably
fanciful is The Creation of Antarctic Light by "Ern
Malley", a collage that was, in fact, by Harold
Stewart - Malley being the creation of Stewart and
James McAuley, in one of Australia's most infamous
literary hoaxes (and the inspiration for Peter Carey's
novel My Life as a Fake).

Each entry Manhire has chosen is complemented by
explanatory notes that often include interesting
asides about Antarctica, a mark of Manhire's lifelong
interest in the continent. Everyone, according to
Thomas Pynchon, has an Antarctica; The Wide White Page
puts on offer an elegant choice.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3092427a4501,00.html


		
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