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ANNA AUGUSCIK

Spoiler Alert: Scott, Science, and Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Expedition Narratives In the fall of 2018, two members of a Russian expedition to Antarctica made international headlines with a rare case of literary rage. The team members – a scientific engineer and a welder – frequently spent time in the research station's library, as apparently "both men became avid readers to pass the lonely hours in the remote facility" (Stewart 2018). Yet, when the technician made a habit of spoiling the book endings for the engineer, the latter stabbed the former. While this episode of recent South Pole history may have involved more than the taste for literature, it raises two aspects that are central to my discussion. For one, this fiction-meets-science incident gone violent speaks to the issue of literary form and specifically its possibilities of carrying knowledge. At first glance, an aversion to spoilers shows a heightened interest in story or content: will the lovers unite; will the treasure be found; will the protagonist survive? The interest in a book's ending, however, could also be understood as an interest in form, or in how the plot would be realised. After all, a choice between a wedding and a funeral on the last pages, a presumably happy or tragic ending, might even change a previously assumed genre. This 'spoiling' business seems restricted to particular genres. Significantly, spoiling the ending of a scientific report or an academic paper would perhaps not have had a similar effect. Even among literary genres, there are some which show little regard for spoilers. Readers of historical fiction, for example, usually know what happens in the end and read for other types of gratification: the thrill of experiencing a 'real-life' person as a fictional character, the novel's interpretation of historical events and figures, or its take on their significance then and now. Secondly, the media reports of this real-life Russian 'mad scientist' incident are an example of public interest in scientific expeditions. In this case, the articles across tabloids and dailies confirm a preference for sensational explorer stories rather than their everyday experience of doing science. In contrast to public media reports about scientists in extreme situations, some contemporary novels are invested in stories about science and scientists for their own sake. Such "science novels" (Schaffeld 2016; Kirchhofer and Roxburgh 2016) often represent scientific expeditions as a particular practice for producing scientific knowledge with a similar detail and complexity they devote to representations of labwork. This interest may not be matched by the entire genre spectrum of the science novel. Contemporary historical fiction about scientific expeditions, for instance, is more prone to sharing the public interest in the frequently retold and discussed journeys of important explorers. But it, too, may show the practical side of expeditions, the aspects of preparation and realisation, the perspectives of their various members, groups and institutions. Thus, the historical novel often plays with a mix of existent historical knowledge and an experiential knowledge characteristic of historical

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 30.2 (Summer 2019): 47-64.

reenactment on the reader's part in order to revise established notions about these explorers. In this paper, I want to probe the relationship between a narrative focus on exploration with an interest in discovery, adventure, nationality and masculinity on the one hand, and, on the other, an emphasis on expeditions as, at least for some disciplines, an everyday practice for scientists to produce knowledge. From among many possible regions and historical periods, as a case study I have chosen three novels which deal with Antarctica as the goal or setting of expeditions and show particular interest in Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition (1910-12) as part of the 'heroic era' of the exploration of the southern continent. I suggest that in addition to understanding these novels as part of a larger canon of 'heroic-era narratives' (Leane 2015), there may be additional merit in reading them as participating in a discourse about scientific expeditions. Contemporary novels about historical expeditions may deal with one aspect of the history of science but they also reflect contemporary perspectives on this history. By focusing on three variants of writing the history of Scott's expedition, I offer a discussion of different perspectives on negotiating the tensions between an interest in explorer myth and scientific expeditions, as well as three ways of asking questions about fictional engagement with historical reenactment as an epistemological tool. Each of the three novels uses different forms of reenactment to represent the history Winter Journals of exploring Antarctica as well as contemporary approaches to this history. According to Vanessa Agnew, historical "reenactment has gained urgency in the West" since the 1990s (2004, 328). Coinciding with historical fiction's interest in famous explorers, Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) reenactors also show a preference for certain canonical events: "the phenomenon remains overwhelmingly committed to themes that are the perennial favorites of grade- school history" (Agnew 2004, 327). Apart from this temporal and thematic convergence for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution with the revival of the historical novel, the academic discussion of these two forms of thinking and experiencing history shares other aspects. Just as "all (good) historical fiction is fundamentally historiographical" (Keen 2006, 182), "[h]istorians […] have loosely appropriated reenactment as a historiographical tool" (Agnew 2004, 329). While historical fiction apparently wants "to expose the crimes of the past, to engage in revisionist story-telling, or to bring up-to-date historical insights to readers of fiction" and its aims are often described as "writing history from below or from alternative perspectives" (Keen 2006, 179), historical reenactment, too, is said to have a similar mix of entertaining and didactic goals: "reenactment apparently fulfils the failed promise of academic history – history entertainingly and authoritatively presented" (Agnew 2004, 330). Even the points of contestation voiced against historical fiction and reenactment show such similarity. Historical fiction is often seen as problematic because of "its misguided focus on the past, its deliberate misrepresentation of history, its manipulation of readers with an appetite for heritage sensations, and its neglect of the interesting present" (Keen 2006, 177-178). Likewise, reenactment has been under fire for its problematic relationship between the past and the present as well as its simplifications – especially in its emphasis on the "technical" and its subjectivity as a "body-based discourse" linked to "conversion narratives" (Agnew 2004, 330; 331). It has been criticized for reducing the "past […] to a conceit for dealing with the present," with "the tendency to collapse temporalities" and, "as a form of speculative historical

representation," for insisting "that the past (and hence the present) might have been different and that acts of oppression and exploitation need not have occurred" (Agnew 2007, 309). As a medium for delivering historical facts and experience as well as historiographic reflection, historical fiction seems to share these aspects with historical reenactment. Taking the latter as formal framing gives rise to the expectation of certain types of knowledge (technical, subjective, experiential) and types of plot (conversion through physical suffering, history of science as a history of individual success or failure). Despite these parallels in how they are theorised, historical reenactment and historical fiction are distinct forms of knowledge. In her article on rethinking reenactment, Agnew reads this practice "[a]s a form of affective history – i.e. historical representation that both takes affect as its object and attempts to elicit affect" (2007, 301). As such "reenactment is less concerned with events, processes or structures than with the individual's physical and psychological experience" (301).1 Historical fiction can be similarly used to "elicit affect," i.e. narrative reenactment may be seen as a textual effect aiming at the reader's experience, just as it can also "take affect as its object," i.e. the novels can be about characters participating in reenactments. However, by directing attention to form, I aim to show that rather than (or besides) doing reenactment, historical novels analyse this affective function of reenactment by linking 'affect' to particular focalisers and/or characters. The novels probe the affordances and limits of reenactment as a way of knowing the history of scientific expeditions. And they do so by offering the perspective of a lesser known member of the expedition, by reflecting on how certain narratives about exploration come into being and differentiating between those on the part of expedition members and the public, or by tying in such narratives to the memory of and use for particular characters in contemporary contexts. I understand reenactment as the epistemic frame and epistemological form that (some) expedition narratives use to analyse contemporary perspectives on heroic explorers. Even when reenactment happens on the level of content, its use in fiction has formal implications and requires attention to form in order to gauge the text's specific epistemological approach. Thus, the following questions will guide my discussion: How does a focus on literary form help in gauging the specific investment of a novel in the history of heroic exploration and expedition as scientific practice respectively? Specifically, how does the novels' use of various forms of 'reenactment' reflect their position in reference to the possible tensions between explorer myth or expedition narrative?

1 From the perspective of theatre studies, Gilli Bush-Bailey also speaks of reenactment as part of the "affective turn" (2012, 283), and she, too, observes that historians are "deeply alarmed by the fetishistic attention to, and visceral excitement of, the embodied engagement with the past" (282). Quoting John Brewer, she specifies the problems they see as "the tendency to collapse the distance between past and present" and the lack of paying tribute to the "importance of working with distance, rather than seeking to erase it" (288).

The question of form vs. content has often been seen as a political one. Its politics extend to literature's position among other fields of knowledge. The question of what literature knows, what form knows, has been especially salient in relation to, at times in contrast to, the sciences. In her book, Unified Fields, Janine Rogers has shown that writers of scientifically informed literature have put to use form to probe specifically literary epistemologies. Rather than a question of choice, "[t]he methodology of reading form – of doing literature and science," she says, "merges fields, genres, and even the roles of author, reader, and literary critic" (2014, xv; original emphasis). Specifically, however, an understanding of form "as an experience and an action," one with "a connective value between literature and science, but also between reader and writer" leads her to reconsider the values of close reading (2014, xvi). Indeed, from the point of view of narratological approaches, the question of form vs. content can hardly be resolved in stern opposition. After all, the particularities of textual sequence, narration, focalisation and characterisation do not just give form to the text, they are the text. For the interest of this paper, I would like to suggest a wide notion of form, including narration, focalisation and characterisation alongside illustrations, maps, chapter divisions, as well as genre. Genre aspects resulting from generic traditions and expectations squeeze, knead, or give form to such narratives. They, too, are part of the text. Questions of genres are particularly pertinent to a focus on contemporary literary narratives of scientific expeditions. The history of scientific expeditions as written history has been very rich in its variation of genre: the scientific report, memoirs or diaries on the part of non-fictional accounts; adventure tales, scientific, imperial, even horror romance on the part of fiction. Such productivity attests to a high public demand for expedition narratives. As science novels with a historical focus on the age of heroic exploration, the three chosen texts – Beryl Bainbridge's The Birthday Boys (1991), Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica (1998) and Rebecca Hunt's Everland (2014) – show an interest in both the myth of the explorers and in the expedition as scientific practice and they negotiate this through tying in these themes with specific textual structures or formal features. In addition, they span the genre spectrum from the historical novel to speculative fiction to a mix of contemporary realist narrative with historical metafiction. As literary examples of the "historical turn" of the 1980s and 90s, on the one hand, and the more recent so-called "new historical fiction" (Keen 2006, 169; 171), on the other, both Bainbridge's and Hunt's texts are aware of the constructedness of history, with the latter as the more overtly self-reflexive text. Robinson's novel, as an early example of the recently fashionable speculative fiction, probes a what-if-scenario in a near-future setting with interspersed textual reference to the geological and human history of Antarctica. As literary representations of Scott, these novels exhibit a spectrum of proximity or distance to the explorer and his expedition. As an account of Scott's journey from London to the South Pole, Bainbridge's novel is closest to the explorer's undertaking. In Robinson's novel, Scott figures mainly through the fictional characters' opinions and reflections on him. Finally, Hunt's text has often been read as a 'roman à clef' about the age of heroic exploration (Wheeler 2014; Alexander 2015). This varied historical interest is reflected in the novels' re-writing of Scott and the discussion of his

position in history. Bożena Kucała summarises the evaluations made and the lessons formulated based on this 'failed' expedition in the course of the 20th century: Assessment of the polar expedition has gone through several stages, starting from the initial glorification of the lost heroes to debunking the myth and severe criticism of Scott's incompetent leadership, through a range of intermediate evaluations, balancing the natural adversities with human weakness and folly as the cause of the failure while acknowledging the men's heroism. (Kucała 2013, 412) While the novels shy away from easy positioning, I read them as entering this debate by connecting possible assessments to particular focalisers and/or characters. By reenacting events of which the ending is not only well known but often consciously 'spoiled,' they offer different perspectives on the relationship between scientific expeditions as part of public knowledge and personal experience. In Bainbridge's novel the original members themselves playfully anticipate retrospective judgments in their first-person accounts of the various phases of the journey. Robinson's Antarctica juxtaposes the irrelevance of the continent's human history for scientists with an explicit public interest in explorers. Finally, Hunt's text links particular ways of re-telling exploration history specifically to scientist characters and thus makes claims about scientists' relation with the history of exploration. The three novels employ different forms of reenactment – enactment, commercial reenactment, and scientific reenactment – in order to gauge what knowledge can be gained through this practice of experiencing history about exploration or about expeditions.

1. From Performative Enactment to Formal Reenactment The Birthday Boys tells the story of Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition from the West India Docks in London via Cardiff and Madeira to Antarctica. It then lays out how the final five men including Scott march to the South Pole, realise that they have been beaten to the Pole by the Norwegian expedition under Roald Amundsen, and finally die on their way back. Bainbridge was not afraid of 'spoiling' the ending: before the first of five chapters, she included a map of the final march which marks the deaths of the explorers on the return journey. When reading a story whose ending is already known by most readers, the question arises what knowledge can be conveyed instead. The novel has been read primarily with an interest in its positioning within a tradition of evaluating this contested undertaking (Robshaw 2010; Cross 1992). Elizabeth Leane remarks that The Birthday Boys "bypasses historical debates about the competency of the polar party or the value of their actions to explore their characters and experiences in more subtle, complex and intimate ways" (2015, 93-94). According to Leane, staying out of an ongoing historical debate allows Bainbridge to embark on her own explorative journey into the minds of her characters. In her reading, the text's interest as a study in character is psychological rather than historical, or, for that matter, scientific. I suggest that the novel does not 'bypass' but is conscious of the historical evaluations. Searching for the right words for what it is that Bainbridge does in this version of re-writing Scott's expedition, critics claim that she "reconstructs" Scott's journey (Anon. 1994b). Elsewhere, Bainbridge is said to "excavate" the hidden

experience of the explorers (Freeman 1994) or to "recreate" the events (Kucała 2013, 411). One reviewer, in fact, evokes reenactment: "Even those with no interest in Captain Scott's polar expeditions will be moved by the lyricism and depth of emotion in this reenactment of his doomed Terra Nova venture" (Akbar 2009). Rather than doing reenactment, however, Bainbridge's historical novel, I contend, is aware of this practice but crucially focuses on the characters acting out the journey, not reenacting it, and is thus decidedly aware of the performative character of the initial enactment. At the same time, by inserting a map of the final journey ‒ a visual example of public perception of exploration ‒ and thus disclosing not only the tragic outcome of the last march to the pole but also the relevance of this well-known ending to any re- writing of the narrative, the text also plays with the potentials and limits of historical reenactment. Hence, reenactment emerges as the effect of the text, in particular of the specificity and sequence of the visual and narrative material. In contrast to a non- fictional historical reenactment, which is said to neglect "lessons about the constructedness of history" (Agnew 2004, 332), this double focus allows the novel to do just that. Fostering an understanding of the specific knowledges involved in a scientific undertaking which requires scientists and non-scientists alike, the novel not only invites a reading as an expedition narrative, but also adds to the (im)possibilities of 'knowing' the past. In other words, the effect of paying attention to both map and narrative, i.e. to the underlying circular structure which begins and ends with the men's death, is to read the novel as paying homage to the history of the individual explorers and their role as members of a scientific expedition, as well as to changing immediate and contemporary responses to this history. The Birthday Boys breaks down Scott's last expedition into five chapters, each a first-person account of one of the five members who participate in the final march. Interspersed with references to previous expeditions and filled with personal memories, the five men present the story of their journey from Britain to the South Pole in chunks, chronologically, with each reporting a particular segment of this journey, in the process characterising themselves and the others. In a teleological reading of the novel which culminates in the men's death, Kucała sees the plot as tracing "their arduous progress towards their destination" and analyses "the correlations between the physical progress of the expedition and each man's journey towards self-knowledge" (2013, 411). This "self-knowledge," however, does not manifest itself to the individual characters but is achieved through what Leane calls the novel's "prismatic technique" (2015, 94): it is the reader who gains knowledge about the characters through understanding the at times contrasting character traits as defined by themselves and others, as well as between these direct definitions and the indirect presentations of character. The resulting individual knowledge is very much tied to the respective position of each member of the expedition. In the context of reenactment, this particular knowledge may be understood as 'experiential knowledge:' guided by distinct narrative voices, the reader comes to experience the various parts of the expedition. At the same time, the reader realises the specificity of each account's perspective: guided by another expedition

member, the experience of each phase would have been a different one. In her reading, Kucała notes that [t]he sequence of speakers is deliberate; it shows the fluctuations of mood from Evans's carefree expectations of a big – and profitable – adventure, to Wilson's and Bowers's naive belief in a great mission, to Scott's self-doubt, to Oates's criticism of the folly of the undertaking. (2013, 418-19) The actual sequence of representation, however, has Wilson's and Bowers's accounts frame Scott's narration, as the five chapter titles read: Petty Officer Edgar (Taff) Evans – June 1910 Dr Edward (Uncle Bill) Wilson – July 1910 The Owner: Captain Robert Falcon (Con) Scott – March 1911 Lt. Henry Robertson (Birdie) Bowers – July 1911 Capt. Lawrence Edward (Titus) Oates – March 1912 The sequence of accounts, then, not only corresponds with certain phases of expeditions – preparations, transit, landing, exploration, evaluation – but also with the question which character can share which knowledge in which phase. After all, the first-person narratives also set limits to the potential knowledge about any particular phase of the expedition. "Taken in tandem," one reviewer observes, "they relate a story far more interesting than that of five virtuous Englishmen rising nobly to the occasion in extreme circumstances: instead, they present us with a microcosmic society of flawed individuals" (Krist 1994). Indeed, the whole seems greater than the sum of its parts but the knowledge we gain is not connected to just any individuals but to specific members of an expedition. From among the five voices, seaman Evans's and Scott's accounts can figure as examples to show the possibilities and limits of knowledge, the characters' conscious performance or enactment as expedition members, and the novel's interest in the practical side of the expedition as well as its scientific goals. The first chapter – narrated by Evans – lays out the first, preparatory phase of an expedition. A series of steps need to be taken before the men can set off on the voyage. Some of these steps need to be taken in London, others on the way to Cardiff. They comprise, for example, repairing, altering and loading the ship with coal and other goods, including scientific equipment, as well as various private precautions, like preparing a will. Seaman Evans's account is illuminating when it comes to the technical and celebratory details, just as it is limited regarding other preparatory steps, such as procuring the backing of the Royal Society or negotiating with sponsors. Evans's account can also be used to show that the members of the expedition consciously enact their role in the project. He is aware that the men on board of the ship are under public scrutiny: "We'd had to keep our shirts on and mind our language" (Bainbridge 2009, 1). His narrative signals the text's awareness of the public's thirst for stories about explorers and their adventures: "there was always someone ready to stand us a drink in return for a yarn" (2). Finally, even seaman Evans reflects about the differences in the expedition members' actual experience and the spin they give them in public. Some changes he makes because of specific cultural contexts,

such as the awareness of his audience's potential homosexual panic: "Mostly I told the story as it happened, only generally I left out the bit about the sweethearts" (5). Other changes, he realises, are needed because some things cannot be understood unless experienced, such as performing "bodily functions in a temperature below zero" (20). The third phase in which the team reach their destination and set up camp is rendered by Scott himself and may be used to question Kucała's verdict that "the journey seems to have no practical purpose" (2013, 415). Apart from the famous Emperor penguin expedition, there are various other expedition teams doing mostly geological and meteorological work which the novel does not seem to take an interest in when the reader's focus remains on the inner life of the characters rather than on the expedition. Scott's account gives plenty of hints concerning the challenges to accommodate these various "requirements of the geological, zoological and Polar factions of the expedition" (Bainbridge 2009, 75). As mentioned above, in addition to the specificity of the narrative voices and the narrative sequence, the text anticipates the chronology of the story with a map put in front of the five chapters. The map, originally drawn by Doreen Murphy in September 1915, shows a section of the Antarctic continent from McMurdo Sound to the South Pole marking the journey of the final march and the deaths of Evans, Oates, Scott, Wilson and Bowers. While few critics pay attention to the "schoolgirl's map" (Anon. 1994a) preceding the five narrative accounts, none discuss that it has not just been copied and inserted but rather redrawn by Bainbridge. This visual double reconstruction of a public tragedy can be read as paying homage to an event of nation-wide and generation-spanning relevance. It can be understood as a hint at postmodern play with historiography, a contemporary re-writing of existing visual and narrative accounts. It can be read as an acknowledgement of the already-known ending, thus rendering the actual five chapters as a sort of prequel to what is already known. Either way, the drawing is a crucial part of the text: as a signifier of cultural context; an ironic gesture, marking the text's genre; a 'spoiler' nudging the reader to pay attention to the 'how' over the 'what.' Mostly, however, it may help us understand that the remaining accounts provide a bigger canvass than the map. While Bainbridge may have redrawn the map of the explorers' return, she did not rewrite the characters' final journey only. Each man's narrative is wide-spanning and chronological, instead of unfolding as an alternative account of the march to the South Pole. Thus, the scope of the text as a whole reaches beyond the drawing, which focuses on the 'race to the pole' and the men's failure rather than on the expedition itself. The five accounts are not just expositions to a tragic finale: the novel acknowledges the known ending to then focus on a more nuanced picture of the various phases of the undertaking of a scientific expedition and each explorer's part as a member thereof. Read as a character study only, Kucała's comparison of Bainbridge's novel to her previous work in which "the epic proportions of the Antarctic mission have been reduced to a 'small-scale drama'" (2013, 412) may seem comprehensible. As a historical science novel and as an expedition narrative, however, the text seems anything but small-scale.

2. Expedition Antarctica and the Lessons of Public Reenactment Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica (1998) was conceived during the author's research for the Mars Trilogy when "he learned that scientists who study Mars often spend time in Antarctica because it is the part of Earth most like Mars" (Jonas 1998). Having finished the SF trilogy, Robinson signed up with the National Science Foundation's artists and writers programme at a time when the continent was very much on the global political agenda. While the Antarctic Treaty System had been in place since 1961, the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty was only signed in 1991 and did not enter into force until around the novel's publication in early 1998. Such a precariously uncertain legal status of a near-future Antarctica is what drives the plot in the eponymous novel. A closer look at its formal structure, however, may complicate a reading of the novel through the lens of its production history. Instead of viewing the continent as a metaphor for Mars, the text suggests reading Antarctica as a stand-in for our own planet. Yet, despite the obvious emphasis on the continent's future, this example of speculative fiction is also significantly interested in its past. Like Bainbridge's novel, this text, too, is preceded by visual material: three consecutive maps zoom in on the entire continent with the routes taken by the respectively failed or successful expeditions led by Scott and Amundsen, on Ross Island and McMurdo Station and, finally, on the Mohn Basin with Shackleton and Roberts Station. While the maps do not function as 'spoilers' to the plot of the novel, as was the case in The Birthday Boys, they ease the readers' orientation as we accompany various protagonists on their journeys to and around the continent. What is more, the maps visualise just how much the history of 'heroic' exploration is part of the contemporary (or near-future) perception of Antarctica, an observation which is spelled out in the narrative text by tying the stories about Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen to particular characters and focalisers. In contrast to Bainbridge's novel, Robinson's moves historical reenactment of heroic-era exploration to the level of content and does not focus on the initial enactment. Instead, it uses a perspectivised experience of historical reenactment and the various focalisers' relationship to the history of exploration in order to gauge the significance of scientific knowledge in and for the public. The story is set in the early 21st century, when some of the late 20th-century ecological risks are causing even greater concern: The world's population was over ten billion and the Dow Jones average was over ten thousand. Global average temperatures were ten degrees higher than a century before, and extreme weather events were a weekly occurrence, causing untold destruction and suffering. (Robinson 1999, 56) In this climate of global warming, Götterdämmerung capitalism, and a US-specific two-party partisanship, the pending ratification of the Antarctica Treaty System attracts the attention of various parties and their conflicting interests. The political advisor Wade Norton is sent to Antarctica by his superior, Senator Chase, in order to report on a series of suspicious incidents in the hope of strengthening the Democrats' battle to support the National Science Foundation (NSF) against the Republican plans to pander to the oil industry instead. As a link between Antarctica and the rest of the world (i.e.

Washington), Wade's function in the narrative is to unite the various interests, represented by specific character focalisers and their plotlines. A series of terror attacks of all things helps him in bringing together the various individual interests in what eventually culminates in a team effort resembling that of an expedition, one consisting of scientists, science administrators, technical support staff, eco-terrorists and their lawyers, proponents of natural gas exploration, reenactment tour guides as well as a matriarchal community of illegal inhabitants called 'ferals' by everyone else. In addition to a political reading, with Wade Norton as protagonist, Antarctica's explicit interest in scientist characters and scientific practice, in the history of and public perspectives on science, open it to a reading as a science novel. Through scientist focalisers and their dialogues with lay persons, the reader is offered scientific knowledge about Antarctica's geological past and insight into scientific methods to understand its implications. At the heart of the scientific plot lies a scientific controversy between dynamicists and stabilists, the former representing a theory of a constantly changing and prone to change Antarctica and the latter believing in its geological immutability and therefore resilience to global warming. The two readings of scientific findings are used to bring home the value of progressive interpretations over conservative ones: "Because the stones did not speak, not really. They had to be translated" (Robinson 1999, 311). Pointing out the discrepant description of the purity of scientific method, on the one hand, and scientists' entanglement in a politico- economic reality, on the other, Elizabeth Leane reads the novel as propagating the idea of "Antarctica as scientific utopia" but also as including science as subject to necessary change: "The utopia envisaged in Robinson's novel is one in which science itself, along with utopia, must be constantly reinvented" (2003, 33). Indeed, a need for change seems to be at the core of the novel. Yet, the novel does not root for radical change but one based on a series of compromises; not for a division of political, economic and scientific aims but for an integration of these interests; not for altogether questioning the motivations of heroic-age exploration but for drawing the 'right' conclusions. There seems to be a tension between the novel's propagation of progress over conservation (or reinvention over repetition, [Leane 2003, 33]) and its critique of an increase in the outsourcing, compartmentalisation and disassociation of the various discourses (which need to be united in the end). This tension, I argue, may be better understood by examining the narrative structure, as well as the relationship between its interest in exploration history, on the one hand, and its status as expedition narrative, on the other. Antarctica consists of fifteen chapters, each subdivided by changes in focalisation. In contrast to one reviewer's observation that Robinson "makes the great explorers of an earlier day – the Amundsens, Scotts and Shackletons – into important characters in the unfolding drama" (Jonas 1998), the historical explorers are not characters themselves but they are introduced, discussed and reflected on by various character focalisers: X, a physically large but gentle reader of Marxist theory and General Field Assistant, with whose perspective the novel begins and ends; his love-interest, Valerie Kenning, a strong and stunning tour guide of reenactment expeditions that trace the footsteps of heroic-era explorers; Wade Norton, the afore-mentioned smart and knowledgeable political advisor to a Democrat US senator; an unnamed environmental lawyer and eco-terrorist; Sylvia Johnston, a former biologist and current National

Science Foundation administrator; finally, Graham Forbes and Geoffrey Michelsen, two geologists and proponents of the dynamicist interpretation of Antarctica's climate. At the outset of the novel, there is a compartmentalisation of the various interests of expeditions and a dissociation of science from the various phases of an expedition. On the one hand, these interests are represented by certain groups and specifically by particular characters (a politician, a lawyer, a scientist, etc.). On the other, scientists are seen at work at their site but not how they get there, prepare for being there, or write up their reports. In fact, we learn that scientists have outsourced these practical matters to private companies, which creates major problems for everyone involved but especially for the relationship between scientists, or "beakers" (Robinson 1999, 61) and the supporting staff – mainly represented by X, with whom, rather than with Wade, the narrative begins and ends. Significantly, both the scientists and X are given special status in the novel through being exempt from the experience of reenacting historical expeditions. Rather than reenacting themselves, they are put in the position of reflecting about other characters' involvement and obsessive evaluation of heroic-era exploration. As X develops from a passive, depressed, and heartbroken character to an active and hopeful one, he gradually comes to understand, and we along with him, the complex structures of groups and representatives in Antarctica. His short-term girlfriend, the reenactment tour guide Valerie Kenning, is the character who most identifies with the explorers in whose footsteps she guides TV documentary teams, writers in residence, political advisors and adventure-seeking privileged white men. She realises that in contrast to the aims of the reenactment expeditions, the Emperor penguin expedition for the amateur scientists Edward Wilson, Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard was conducted "for the sake of science" (17). While Val becomes frustrated with the lack of such goals, the text uses the characters' references to explorers and their reenactment of historical expeditions to show a variety of specific usages of this interest ranging from drawing the wrong conclusions to lacking connection with the past. For example, two young male members of Val's reenactment expedition discuss Scott's mistakes, but their self-aggrandisement is exposed when they do not perform despite the cushy conditions of a guided adventure tour. In contrast, the characters who may be closest to the three explorers of the penguin expedition, the professional scientists, are not interested in the explorer history at all, making fun of the public interest in heroic exploration and calling reenactors "history buffs" (152). The only first-person narrator, whose accounts are interspersed with the extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narration and changing character focalisers, is Ta Shu, the current writer in residence of the National Science Foundation (a post once held by Robinson), a Chinese geomancer and feng-shui specialist whose project involves filming and commenting on his experience as part of Valerie's In the Footsteps of Amundsen expedition. During the reenactment Ta Shu explains Antarctica to his fictional audience via the film footage, his poetry and what he calls "the human stories" (137): the history of the continent's exploration from Captain Cook in the late 18th century to Scott's Discovery (1902) and Terra Nova (1912) expeditions. Thematic links between Ta Shu's interpretations of the heroic-era explorers and the various other characters and their plotlines help draw connections between the historical expeditions

which Ta Shu renarrates, the reenactment expeditions in which he participates and the figurative reading of the novel as expedition. There are parallels between the historical explorers in Ta Shu's narration and the characters themselves (for example, Valerie shows respect for and similarities with Birdie Bowers) but even if they do not fully correspond, the various interests mirror the various historical-era expedition members and their aims. In addition, there are obvious parallels to some of the other characters and their plotlines: parallel to the choices between dynamicists and stabilists (scientist characters), the co-ops and Götterdämmerung capitalism (X), historical reenactment and going 'feral' (Val), Ta Shu's hypodiegesis suggests a preference for Shackleton over Scott: "You could be immortalized in concrete, or see your kid grow up. Better a live donkey than a dead lion, Shackleton had said. Scott hadn't agreed. But which would the world choose? What story did they like better?" (658). The novel's multiple plotlines and representative characters reflect the multitude and complexity of expedition goals as well as the specific (and at times limited) knowledge of expedition members. When focusing on the novel as a whole, we may come to read it as an expedition narrative, albeit neither one that traces the expedition of one team nor one that solely traces a scientific expedition. While various character focalisers and their plotlines may well provide further readings (a Marxist reading based on X; a feminist reading focusing on the character of Val; an ecological reading with reference to the eco-terrorist or the 'ferals,' etc.), as part of an expedition narrative, they are each assigned roles to secure the expedition's success. In the end, a need for change, as observed by Leane, seems to unite the characters and the particular interests they represent. This change is traceable on the level of character and theme. The characters' initial difficulties are overcome as they experience various ways of empowerment and learn to draw the right conclusions both politically (a new Treaty which takes into consideration what previous agreements have neglected) as well as scientifically (the dynamicist interpretation wins over the stabilist theory of climate change in Antarctica). But change is also demonstrable on the level of form. Instead of a scientific report, the 'expedition' ends with a document of eight paragraphs, into which various kinds of knowledge are incorporated. Although the scientist characters leave prematurely and the task of translating scientific knowledge into general guidelines falls on Wade, the scientific findings which help win the novel's scientific controversy are crucial for the collaborative production of the document. While individual lessons can be learned based on the characters' experience of following in the footsteps of explorers (i.e. an experience gained through reenactment), the implementation of rules for a better future of Antarctica (and planet Earth) is oriented on lessons from an expedition-like team effort. Watching the characters grow based on and beyond the lessons of historical exploration and its reenactment, the reader is supposed to learn as well: Antarctica as speculative fiction is a cautionary tale via positive reinforcement.

3. Scientists and the Trauma of Reenactment Rebecca Hunt's Everland (2014) tells the story of not one but two expeditions. The device of a multiple temporal setting allows the novel to focus on both enactment and reenactment, as was the case with Bainbridge's text. In contrast to this earlier historical

novel but similarly to Robinson's text, in Everland historical reenactment happens on the level of content. As in Robinson, the reenactment is very much tied to a specific perspective via focalisation, but this time through a scientist-character. By redirecting the question of what 'we' can learn from the past to what scientists can learn, however, the text seems interested in a specifically scientist-oriented perspective on the history of exploration. In 1913 three members of the fictional Kismet expedition are sent to explore an island off Antarctica, while the rest of the crew is to circumnavigate it and then to pick them up again. A storm leads to the expedition trio's near death on the way to the island, so that, when they finally arrive there, their goal changes from exploring to surviving. Various obstacles and some bad choices later, two of them die on the island (which they christen 'Everland' using the name of their expedition's patron). The Kismet crew, who faced their own challenges in arriving at the meeting point in time, only find one remaining member of the team alive, if barely so. Finally, he too dies on the ship. In the meantime, the crew under the leadership of Captain Lawrence have come up with an explanation of the events on Everland: Napps, the charismatic leader of the trio and coincidentally a rival to Captain Lawrence, has been found guilty of persuading his physically able but intellectually inferior second-man Millet-Bass to desert their third man, Dinners, a scientist whose family connections rather than experience as an explorer have brought him to Antarctica. As readers, we learn that this official explanation stands in contrast to the actual events, as Napps, in fact, dies because he searches for Dinners, who, troubled by paranoia and visions, had run away. The second plotline is set in the year 2012 when three members of the multinational, multidisciplinary science team stationed at the Antarctic base Aegeus are sent to Everland both in celebration of the centennial of the previous expedition and in order to explore the island's fauna. This trio consists of the expedition veteran, middle-aged leader Decker, the tomboyish field assistant Jess and the passionate scientist Brix, who also may have earned her place on the expedition due to good relations rather than merit. Because of weather conditions and human error, the team finds itself in danger. Decker and Jess manage to escape, while Brix is found much later and barely alive by the Aegeus crew, hidden under the very same boat under which Dinners had been found by the Kismet crew 100 years earlier. The parallels between the two plotlines are eye- catching and the differences between them in terms of character constellation (all male trio in 1913, one man and two women in 2012) and progress in terms of science and technology do not seem to significantly affect this parallel structure. This novel's interest in 'reenactment' is obvious. Again, the form seems to partly support readings of repetition, parallels, doppelgängers and even conversion: apart from the obvious similarities between the events of the two expeditions, the plot begins with the Kismet crew discovering Dinners in 1913 and ends with Brix being found by the Aegeus team in 2012. The reenactment is playfully reversed when, for example, certain statements made by characters in the 21st century are repeated by characters from the 20th century because they come later in the plot, but evidently not in the story time. Such anachronisms can also be observed when characters come to a conclusion about certain events and the reader is only then presented with the events in flashback.

Significantly, the false account of what happened to the fictional, 'heroic-era' explorers, is staged in a film viewed by the members of the contemporary expedition. The 'spoiled' ending of the first expedition and the viewers' emotional response to it is what frames the second expedition's reenactment. But, crucially, we learn with Brix that the 'spoiler' was wrong. In the absence of "hard-core lab-science" (Rohn 2015), critics agree that what readers can learn from the novel pertains to human nature, on the one hand, and how to deal with the past, on the other. In respect to the first observations, critics seem to agree that in Hunt’s novel "the human character is seen in its essential form" (Wheeler 2014; see also Alexander 2015). Yet, when we look a little closer at the character constellations and the development of their roles, this universalist claim is problematic: whose humanity is universal? Not helping each other, as Decker did, or helping and dying because of this, as Napps did? After all, the character triangles do not match throughout the novel. As readers, we think we have found the respective doppelgänger but the triangles shift and turn as we get closer to the end of the novel. The second major interest observed by critics, after human nature, is the relationship with the past. In her reading of Everland, Jessica Hewenn notes that "the novel is concerned with contesting our perceived access to the past, and the implications of our ability to correctly decipher it" (2016, 94). It is this 'our' that does not seem entirely persuasive: Hewenn speaks about our access to the past when the novel specifically makes observations about scientists and their uses of the past. Another look at narrative form may serve to dispute this claim. Neither is the text narrated by "the same voice" in "authorial style" (Alexander 2015), nor, as Hewenn claims in comparison with Bainbridge's text, by "multiple narrators" (2016, 95). Instead, we have one extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narrator and changing focalisation, with Brix, for example, taking up most space as internal focaliser in the second plotline. This emphasis on subjectivity goes against the 'universalist' understanding of 'human nature.' Hewenn's reading may seem more plausible when we consider the elephant in the novel: Scott. She reads the novel as a "homage to Scott" and in consequence understands this and several other "gestures towards Scott's expedition" as constituting "the novel's critique of legacy more generally in the specific legacy of the most famous British Antarctic explorer" (2016, 99). The impetus to draw connections between the characters' dealing with the Kismet legacy and our dealing with Scott's legacy is certainly comprehensible. The connections with Scott are not visible at first glance but both the context of writing the novel around the centenary of Scott's expedition and references in the text, for example a flag explicitly linked to Scott and his men, have been used by critics to draw parallels with the historical expedition as well. But this is also complicated by the novel. Hewenn reads reenactment as a sign of trauma: "In Everland, this sense of compulsive repetition dominates the return to the island in the second expedition, the reenactment of a final arrival that only futilely combats the inherent humanlessness of the landscape for two months" (2016, 103). In my reading, the almost-fatal results of trauma for the scientist character indicate a need to rethink how heroic-era explorations are remembered and by whom. There is a need for new narratives about scientific expeditions, in which the tensions between the focus on

larger-than-life explorers and the everyday experience of knowledge production are reflected and overcome.

Conclusion: On Forms of Reenactment and Reenactments of Form In the three novels I have discussed, reenactment has different functions in connection with the texts' genre and narrative structure, which differently convey their analysis of the relationship between expeditions understood in the light or shadow of the myth of explorers on the one hand and as scientific practice on the other. In this perspective, literary form plays a large part in how these texts and their readers come to understand this relationship. In Bainbridge's The Birthday Boys, a historical novel, the concern with the historical Scott is evident; what is more surprising and highlighted by focusing on the form of its narration, is its interest in the aspect of the explorer's journey as scientific expedition. On the level of character, the novel represents the conscious enactment of the expedition, which is reflected by each member. In an anachronical gesture, the various accounts come to represent the various positions taken in the historical assessments of Scott and his status as hero or failure. Rather than a mere reenactment of the fatal journey, as represented in the map which precedes the narrative, the text as a whole emphasises the various members' perspectives on the complex undertaking of an expedition and connects these with the reader's knowledge of its outcome as well as its public relevance at various stages later on. In Robinson's Antarctica both the what- if scenario of near-future Antarctica and the teachings of the past are used to drive home an argument about the dangers of capitalism and a self-interest-led partisanship. At the same time, the novel's interest in the history of the continent is crucial to the text's propositions for imagining its future. Using focalisation to guide readerly empathy and by developing a proliferation of perspectives, the text shows a discrepancy between the public interest in heroic-era explorers and the 'reality' of expeditions for scientists, for whom the historical Scott is of little interest. The reader is invited to draw conclusions from the characters' perspectives on historical explorers, which are gained from reenactment, but is also led to perceive an expedition-like team effort (of which scientific knowledge forms a part) as necessary to ensure sustainable change. Finally, in Hunt's Everland, a mix of a contemporary science novel and historical metafiction, the interest in the heroic-era narrative – though not explicitly in Scott – is shared by the characters and the novel's form. Similarly to Robinson's novel, reenactment happens on the level of content: it is consciously performed by the 2012 trio in their centennial celebration of the 1913 expedition. The reenactment is also playfully taken up by the sequence of narration. Scott is a looming presence in the novel: while the 1913 expedition is not Scott's, the conflictual relationship between the heroic-era characters and the Master-and-Commander-type hierarchies plays with the reader's knowledge of the myths encircling historical exploration. While the novel may be read in relation to 'our' interpretations of Scott's status, it offers itself to be understood as an analysis of a distinctly scientific perspective. The novel can thus be read as a comment on the specific trauma of the history of scientific expeditions for scientists. And it points to the possible trauma ensuing from a false cultural memory rather than a presumably

traumatic past. As part of a canon of rewriting Scott, the three novels participate in historical assessments of his final expedition and the history of exploration. They are interested in questions of failure and success – in the outcome of expeditions. As science novels and expedition narratives, their interest is also one in the process of this scientific practice. Formal reenactment can serve different purposes, across a variety of science-and-society frameworks. In all cases, expectations from reenactment produce the frame by which we read, but this framing and the narrative techniques within address the relationship between science and society from various angles. Meanwhile, the similarities of historical fiction (or historically-interested fiction) and historical reenactment should not be overstretched: rather than doing reenactment, the novels analyse the affordances and the limits of reenactment as epistemological tool.

Acknowledgment The author would like to acknowledge the generous support by the Volkswagen Foundation for her work on this article as part of the Fiction Meets Science (FMS) Project.

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