47 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. Anglistik, Jahrgang 30 (2019), Ausgabe 2 © 2019 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 48 ANNA AUGUSCIK 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 Anglistik, Jahrgang 30 (2019), Ausgabe 2 © 2019 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) SCOTT, SCIENCE, AND FORMS OF REENACTMENT IN CONTEMPORARY EXPEDITION NARRATIVES 49 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