260-odd pages later, I have finished The Spectral Arctic [available as an open source pdf here!]
For those curious: the central premise is that western white folks have long found the Arctic dreamy and magical AF, as evidenced by our cultural outputs around the region in general, and the lost Franklin expedition in particular, and I think Professor McCorristine has a point. He does not ever bring up The Golden Compass, but I think that’s probably my personal British ur-text for beautiful polar strangeness.
In the section on contemporary culture (mostly McCorristine focuses on the Victorian), AMC’s The Terror is indeed directly addressed, but as this book went to the publisher before the series aired, the most he can say is that it was recently filmed. Instead he briefly discusses the content of Dan Simmons’s novel the show was based on, mostly in accordance with how it aligns with his interest in a high frequency of clairvoyant activity associated with the doomed explorers. Conversely, I find I do not have so much interest in 19th century clairvoyants! I care about ghosts but don’t really care about mediums, no idea why. Anyway, in The Terror the novel Crozier is apparently something of a psychic, which is not at all a feature that survived in the transfer. But the show is indeed spooky and mystical and I’ve used the word ‘haunted’ like fifty times talking about it, all of which would surely have Shane nodding happily.
Other highlights included:
- Whenever McCorristine would casually refer to white people using the Inuktitut word ‘qallunaat’
- Such as this, which also made me shiver: “The Inuit reported that these qallunaat carried iron, acted strangely and ate human flesh.”
- The reveal that poet Alfred Tennyson was John Franklin’s nephew
- “By the nineteenth century, the records of expedition commanders were supposed to be sober narrations of events, rarely interrupted by references to the author’s body, emotions or passions.”
- When I tipsily texted Emily: “The Bictorians LOL mistype but okay the Bitchtorians did not meet a foreign land they could not mysticize”
- When they were overwintering in the ice, Parry made his men run around the deck while he played a barrel organ, and they got really into it and started to, quote, “frolic among themselves” with “much humour.” Like imagine you’re a chill Inuit just hunting some seals, and you come upon a shipful of pale dudes dancing around to this shit in the middle of winter. I WOULD PEE.
- Enchanting and eerie first-hand descriptions of the dark twilit winter on the ice, the sounds on the still air, the lights glowing
- Finally understanding what McCorristine was saying about reveries: to experience a reverie is to dream the world, and so to experience a reverie in the Arctic is to have the landscape be in you and you in it. To be “drawn in,” as he puts it.
- The explorers who found English footprints and initials carved in rocks near their ship, then realized they were from themselves or other explorers years earlier!!! GHOSTS. A FROZEN PERMANENCE.
- “Indeed, as a spatially hybrid entity, the British Empire itself only really worked as an emotional space.” This is actually pretty straightforward at the bones of it but the phrasing makes me imagine a drunk 19th-c lord slurring “England is like, a state of mind, brothren”
- Perhaps the winner of Most Sincerely What The Fuck: this polar-obsessed man named Snow managed to slip a page from a Book of Common Prayer that had been found in the Arctic under a skull of one of Franklin’s men, into the coffin of Abraham Lincoln
- “Coppin’s young son William often ran to embrace the ghost when he saw her standing near the walls in the house, injuring himself in the process.” This fucking Victorian child running into a wall trying to hug a ghost, I fucking…
- As a medical student Arthur Conan Doyle served as a young ship’s surgeon on a whaler that sailed into the north, and you better believe he wrote a polar ghost story after
- But it was about a hundred years later when those anthropologists discovered evidence of lead poisoning that the Franklin speculative fiction scene exploded
- “On King William Island, Inuit used to say that if you found a white man’s grave, you’d never find it a second time—because it had ghosts around it.” [clipped Justin McElroy delivery]: Fuck.
- You don’t tend to read a lot of call-out posts about Canada’s dubious cultural politics vis a vis its national myth-making, and then Shane McCorristine comes along with some lines with enough dry heat to melt the ice
- Margaret Atwood, fellow Frankophile?? More on This to come
