href="#ulink_dab191a5-f6dd-5a8b-9774-7153eacb3fa5">172 Greenlanders from the east coast ←58 | 59→and the Inughuit from North-West Greenland, who lived outside the European system, were perpetuated as “noble savages” and a true “nature people” – symbiotically attached to nature, unparalleled in their knowledge of Arctic conditions and perfectly adjusted to living in the polar zones. At the same time, the uninhabited icesheet and North-East Greenland came to be represented as a predominantly delightful and compelling unique site of male adventure. This image stood in stark contrast to the earlier representations of the area as a terrifyingly perilous environment.
Since the authors of these expedition accounts hailed from countries which cultivated expansionist aspirations173 and their ventures in Greenland were associated with the rivalry of Western countries in and for the exploration of the Arctic, which spiralled in the late 19th century, I believe that their texts should be regarded as a species of colonial or colonialist literature, as discussed by postcolonial scholar Elleke Boehmer.174 The Scandinavian reports also sought to legitimise Western presence in the areas under exploration and their subordination to the Western system of knowledge, which was sometimes followed by physical territorial expansion, as was the case with East and North Greenland. As a variety of colonial travel literature, the writings about polar expeditions are, to use Arne Melberg’s expression, an “ecumenical” genre175 which mediates between facts and fiction, and autobiography and ethnography as well as interlacing various discourses, literary categories and social codes.176 Given the ←59 | 60→complicated meaning-making processes resulting from the discursivisation of the Other which I presupposed, polar expedition literature should at the same time be comprehended as an “interference,” despite its obvious connections to imperialism. What I mean is, as Holland and Huggan observe, that such literature nurtured expansionist aspirations on the one hand and challenged commonly upheld preconceptions about the Other on the other.177
That I refer to The New People and My Travel Diary as colonial literature results from my belief that relationships between Denmark and Greenland can be examined within the framework of postcolonial critical theory, at the same time asserting the distinctiveness of the history of the Arctic regions. Since every colonial and postcolonial conjuncture, as emphasised for example by Diana Byrdon and Helen Tiffin, is different,178 some critics decry the practice of explaining local conditions by means of imported theoretical models.179 For this reason, specific geographical, social and historical factors must be taken into account in every case.180 Danish postcolonial scholars who study the complex Danish-Greenlandic relationships in literature, notably Karen Langgård and Kirsten Thisted, argue that, if applied self-critically, postcolonial theories do not have to “absorb” local traditions. Rather, such theories can contribute to augmenting these traditions with a new dimension. As this idea is one of the cornerstones of my book, I analyse the representations of North Greenland by drawing on the canonical theoretical texts of postcolonial studies (Homi Bhabha, Edward W. Said and Johannes Fabian) and critical studies, in particular on analyses of colonial travel literature (Mary Louise Pratt, Syed Manzurul Islam, Peter Hulme, Lesley Wylie and Richard Phillips), but I also rely on the ←60 | 61→contributions which attend specifically to polar expedition accounts with their distinctive features (Kirsten Thisted, Silje Gaupseth, Silje Solheim Karlsen, Johan Schimanski, Ulrike Spring, Fredrik Chr. Brøgger, Hanna-Mari Ikonen and Samu Pehkonen).
My analyses below are powerfully informed by Brian Porter’s observation that travel writings markedly embody “the fundamental ambiguity of representation.”181 This ambiguity results from the fact that every representation, which is a construct in itself, inevitably contains a subject position which is neither stable nor ultimately given.182 This means that, as Bhabha insists, the subject is always split and it is impossible to trace back the subject’s source (just as it is impossible to find “an origin for the Other”).183 Therefore, the subject that speaks about reality is not just Said’s Orientalist, who is positioned “outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact” and as a “self-authorised ‘authority’ ” that represents the Other.184 Rather, as Pratt insists, as the traveller interacts with the local travelees, his/her travel narrative grows polyphonic, a quality Pratt calls “heteroglossia,” including the presence of the Other as well.185
These discordant positions vis-à-vis the Other are expressed in two modes of travelling and their related strategies of representations, which are investigated by literary researcher Syed Manzurul Islam. One of the modes involves demarcating a rigid boundary between the (European) subject and the (non-European) Other, which immobilises the former in the space it occupies. The other mode entails a genuine interaction with the Other, which affords the subject mobility and promotes either going beyond or completely eliminating the prior boundary. Islam calls these two models of travelling, respectively, sedentary travel and nomadic travel186 and associates them, accordingly, with imperialist ideology and with transcending it. In this book, I argue that it is possible for one subject to practice both these modes of travelling and to take the different positions they entail. This translates into the ambivalent construction of North Greenland in Rasmussen’s writings.
Emphasising the constructionist nature of literary representations, my argument focuses on what Swedish literary scholar Peter Stadius calls “travel ←61 | 62→depiction” [Swedish: skildring av en resa],187 that is, on the texts of Rasmussen’s accounts, on their exteriority in relation to the objects they depict,188 whereby I do not attempt to assess the fictionality or referentiality of his works. This also concerns the autobiographical “I,” which I construe to be not Knud Rasmussen himself but his self-staging persona,189 a kind of metonymic extension, which reverberates with Carl Thompson’s insight that travel literature is not only “a form of writing about the self” but also “a writing of the self.”190 The writer’s “self” is thus viewed as delimited by textuality and constructed through certain language discourses, while its existence hinges upon the system of representation in which it develops and through which it expresses itself.191 The system also includes the fashioning of the narrator, which is one of the most important strategies expedition accounts contrive to win popularity with the readership.192
The approach outlined above dovetails with the method of reading literature as a process which Bhabha postulates:
The “true” is always marked and informed by the ambivalence of the process of emergence itself, the productivity of meanings that construct counter-knowledges in medias res, in the very act of agonism, within the terms of a negotiation (rather than a negation) of oppositional and antagonistic elements.193
