Imperial ice? The influence of Empire on contemporary French and British Antarctic travel writing

Abstract

This paper proposes a comparative study of imperialism in recent travel narratives to Antarctic regions by the French political commentator Jean-Paul Kauffmann and the English literary critic Francis Spufford. In spite of the apparent homogeneity of these desolate and austere landscapes of ice and snow, it is evident that the ‘French’ ice of the Kerguelen Islands appeals to Kauffmann whereas the ‘British’ ice of the South Pole beckons to Spufford, echoing the traditional relationship between colony and Empire. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, I question whether these two contemporary travel narratives constitute classic examples of the imperial gaze or whether, in the absence of opposing cultural influences, the ice itself takes on an inherently anachronistic role, freezing in time and nature the characteristics and values of the Empire like an environmental monument to imperialism.

Keywords:

• Antarctica
• Imperialism
• Jean-Paul Kauffmann
• Kerguelen Islands
• Francis Spufford
• adventure travel
• imperial gaze

Notes

Notes

1. Stephen Martin, A History of Antarctica (Sydney: State Library of NSW Press, 1996), 257.

2. See http://www.antarcticaflights.com.au/ (accessed June 10, 2009).

3. See http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/historic-flight-lands-in-antarctica/2008/01/11/1199988538801.html (accessed June 13 2009).

4. Jean-Paul Kauffmann, L’Arche des Kerguelen: Voyage aux îles de la Désolation (Paris: Flammarion, 1993); quotations in French will be taken from the second edition (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2002) [henceforth L’Arche]. They will be followed in the text by translations by Patricia Clancy, The Arch of Kerguelen: Voyage to the Isles of Desolation (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000) [henceforth The Arch].

5. Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice in the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). Quotations in this article refer to the second edition, 2003.

6. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992).

7. Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Trémarec, Mémoire sur l’établissement d’une colonie dans la France australe and Réflexions sur les avantages qui peut procurer la France australe, Archives de la Marine, Fonds Margry, juillet 1772. Cited in Gracie Delépine, L’Amiral Kerguelen et les mythes de son temps (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 61.

8. Cited in Delépine, L’Amiral Kerguelen et les mythes de son temps, 131.

9. See Laurence Gould, ‘Emergence of Antarctica: the mythical land’, in Frozen Futures: A Prophetic Report from Antarctica (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), 27.

10. This famous vessel is named after the French explorer, Marc Joseph Marion du Fresne, who landed in Tasmania in 1772 and died soon after at the hands of Maori people in New Zealand.

11. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 201–11.

12. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 204.

13. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 130

14. For a comprehensive listing of works on the Antarctic, see Elizabeth Leane's website ‘Representations of Antarctica: A Bibliography’, http://www.utas.edu.au/english/Representations_of_Antarctica/ (accessed June 20, 2009).

15. An English version of this film, entitled March of the Penguins, also appeared in the same year, but the dialogue attributed to the penguins in the French film was replaced by a documentary style narration by voiceover.