Mapping Ultima Thule. Agata Lubowicka

intertextuality” [Swedish: en källa för medveten eller omedveten intertextualitet]¹²⁹ in works of later writers. As systems of representation, literary texts are works written by individual people whose choice is, to a degree, pre-determined by what Sherrill Grace, the author of Canada and the Ide of North, calls “tools, codes, signs”¹³⁰ – ready-made and ready-to-be-reused elements, rhetorical devices designed to produce meanings and persuade readers. In colonial literary texts, they are important components of representations which impose European cognitive codes on the Other, through which the Other is “read” on the basis of a pre-existing matrix of understandings and, consequently, subjected to colonial appropriation.¹³¹

Postcolonial critics take different positions on how these fixed, recurrent literary elements instrumental in coding the ideology of imperial discourse should be named.¹³² Drawing on the approaches of scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt, Peter Hulme and Lesley Wylie,¹³³ in this book I employ the term “colonial tropes,” ←51 | 52→defined as “repertoires of devices and conventions”¹³⁴ of colonial travel writing, and focus on their role in exerting discursive power over literary texts.¹³⁵

2 The Split Subject and Ambivalence

Said has invited ample criticism for, among others, overlooking fissures, and that which is forcefully excluded from the text of colonial discourse.¹³⁶ This issue is addressed by Indian postcolonial theoretician and critic Homi K. Bhabha (born in 1949), whose theories of the split subject and the ambivalence of colonial articulation I also use in this book.

In his essay “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Bhabha quotes Said’s distinction between latent Orientalism, which is “an unconscious positivity,” and manifest Orientalism, which is “the stated knowledges and views about the Orient.”¹³⁷ Bhabha develops this theory by examining the changeability and ambivalence of Orientalist discourse and attending to cracks in articulations of colonial power. By claiming that colonial discourse is ambivalent in and by itself, he means not only that at any moment of colonial articulation there must be a resistance to power, but also that there always must be an agency of colonial resistance, not because the colonised display an intention of oppositional action, but because colonial representations are always overdetermined and ambivalent.¹³⁸

This crack within the unilateral working of colonial discourse and the ambivalence which results from it entail – inevitably, according to Bhabha – a split within the subject. Bhabha insists that it is impossible to pinpoint the source of ←52 | 53→both the coloniser and the colonised “within a tradition of representation that conceives of identity as the satisfaction of a totalizing, plentitudinous object of vision,”¹³⁹ and for this reason, the construction of subjectivity within colonial relations must always recur “as a persisting questioning of the frame, the space of representation.”¹⁴⁰ This space of interrogation, which Bhabha calls “the space of the adversarial,”¹⁴¹ is grounded in a fundamental difference which disrupts or topples dominant representations. The difference surfaces even in the most conventional colonial texts, without ever being “entirely on the outside or implacably oppositional.”¹⁴² As Stephen Slemon observes in his interpretation of Bhabhas theory, it is in this antagonistic space that the colonised become “agents of resistance and change.”¹⁴³

Bhabha’s theories have provoked criticism from other postcolonial theorists. One reason for this criticism is their refusal to locate the Other’s resistance within the contradictions of the colonial text, which purportedly obfuscates proper anti-colonial actions.¹⁴⁴ Another important objection is Bhabha’s disregard for any specific colonial conditions.¹⁴⁵ According to Abdul R. JanMohamed, Bhabha promotes a misguided belief that the native in a way possesses colonial power and, consequently, that colonial discourse is a discourse of both the coloniser and the colonised.¹⁴⁶

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Despite such critiques, Bhabha’s theoretical thought has fostered a growingly common view among postcolonial researchers that clear connections between literature on the one hand and imperialism and colonialism on the other are by no means a testimony to the absolute authority of colonial writing.¹⁴⁷ Namely, colonial texts are never exclusively “imperialist” or, for that matter, “anti-imperialist”; rather, they are always to some extent hybrid and ambivalent as a result of the encounter of the coloniser and the colonised.¹⁴⁸ Therefore, postcolonial re-readings of colonial literary texts are supposed not only to demonstrate the writers’ links to imperialism, but also to identify the “counter-colonial properties”¹⁴⁹ of these texts through what has come to be called “motivated acts of reading.”¹⁵⁰

3 Colonialism and the Discourse of Polar Expeditions: Polar Literature as a Product of Their Liaisons

In the 19th century, the Arctic areas of Greenland attracted the attention of several world powers, in particular the US and the UK, for whom the exploration of remote and trackless Arctic territories – the last “uncharted parts” of the Western world – was a matter of re-asserting their prestige and position in the international power structure.¹⁵¹ The enhanced interest in successive expeditions and their profound discursivisation fostered a dynamic, coherent discourse on the exploration of polar zones.¹⁵² The fact that the Scandinavian countries joined the rivalry for the last “undiscovered” areas in the second half of the 19th century was associated with the rise of nationalism in these countries, which was expressed in what Swedish scholar Inger Nilsson calls “small state imperialism” [Swedish: småstatsimperialism].¹⁵³ Small state imperialism manifested itself in an ←54 | 55→increased preoccupation with the Far North, its scientific conquest and, importantly, territorial expansion.¹⁵⁴ As in Said’s Orientalism, science and conquest went hand in hand.¹⁵⁵

Kirsten Hastrup observes that the self-reflectivity of polar explorers and their motivations to act were