The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

The Mountain and Cultural Aesthetic

Ulrike Spring & Johan Schimanski
Austro-Hungarian and Other Mountains in Arctic Discourse

Working with the history of Arctic discourse means placing the focus firmly on the way in which the Arctic is received in the public imagination and on the way in which representations of the Arctic and of Arctic exploration previsage and adapt to that process of reception. In the case of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition (1872-74), mountains play a central role as a category of perception, allowing both the explorers and the public to use already formed conceptions of mountains in their appropriation of the strange new world of the Arctic. Several of the expedition members had direct knowledge of mountains: They include one of the expedition's leaders, the alpine tourist, surveyor and glaciologist Julius Payer, two hired mountain hunters from the Tyrolean alps, and the hired Tromsø skipper Elling Carlsen. The discovery of a previously unknown mountain landscape to the east of Spitzbergen, named Kaiser-Franz-Josephs-Land by the explorers, allowed them to use their practical knowledge of mountains not only in surviving Arctic conditions in general, but also in dealing with actual mountains in the Arctic. Payer, the hunter Haller, and Carlsen all wrote accounts of the expedition in which polar discourse intersects with mountain discourse. The same did numerous contemporary journalists who did not accompany the explorers, writing on the European mainland, in close contact with public imaginings about the Arctic. In all these accounts and in related visual and tangible representations, polar discourse is informed in different ways by the practical, scientific, cultural and aesthetic categories of mountain discourse. The same goes for Christoph Ransmayr's 1984 postmodernist novel, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, based on the expedition. This paper combines literary and historical approaches in exploring some of the underlying topoi and delineating cultural and historical grounds for differentiation in these particular intersections of Arctic and mountain discourse.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES