North Greenland and the Inughuit. The narrator, whose distinctive features include Europeanness, masculinity, middle-class membership and scientific aspirations as implied by his participation in the “literary” expedition, presents his motivations for undertaking a journey in order to meet the Other, which he then turns into the object of his narrative, thereby investing it with new meanings. His first step towards the discovery of the North-Greenlandic world is an imaginary feat, driven by the power of the old Greenlandic story-teller’s narrative, which the introduction evokes. This narrative breeds the concept of an origin in which the Inughuit are imagined – invented – as exotic Hyperboreans who inhabit the northernmost of all lands, situated on the fringes of the European world. Consequently, a journey to this place, which the narrator perceives as remote, is discursivised as ensuing from the cumulative influence of pre-existing, superimposed information, prejudgements and narratives about the Other.
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Telling a story of himself and the events preceding the journey in retrospect, the narrator begins with his expectations as to the remote, northern realm: it is forever locked in ice, knows no daylight and is inhabited by half-legendary, exotic creatures who, “different from all others,” do not resemble people he knows. This image of North Greenland and its inhabitants reproduces an entrenched stereotype of the island as the space of the Other and as “other” space: like Said’s Orient, the unknown Arctic Greenland, as perceived by a traveller who plans on going there, embodies that which Europe is not and exists first and foremost as a projection of his own ideas and expectations. That his perspective is rooted in European (Danish) culture is indisputable, yet the menacing, distant Other tempts him with its exoticism and remoteness, becoming the imaginary destination of his future journey. This journey will produce another narrative, one which the traveller is now presenting to the reader, wiser as he is from all his experiences on the journey. The new narrative will serve as a starting point for other travellers.206
For the narrator of The New People, the experience of North Greenland begins at an indefinite place in West Greenland in his childhood and is mediated by the tales of an indigenous Greenlandic story-teller, to whom people living far off in the North are as foreign and as exotic as they are to a European boy that listens to her stories. The character of an old Greenlandic woman is not only an evocation of an old memory. Importantly, she embodies native knowledge, which the narrator accepts and recognises as a worldview equally as legitimate as the European one. It is from this woman that he first hears the term “new,” which he picks up to call the object of his dreams: new people and new land. At the same time, his narrative gets inscribed in the European mythological order as the imagined “new people” are placed at the periphery of the charted world, just behind the dwelling ←69 | 70→of the god of the North Wind, Boreas.207 Underpinned by both indigenous and European knowledge, the dual mythical pattern resembles the quest in search of the promised land of Canaan; it sets the direction and the route for the journey into the unknown as a network of metaphorical associations enabling the narrator to orient himself amidst “the unpredictable novelty of things.”208
In the preface to the account a split has already been produced in the European subject, who on the one hand inscribes his narrative in the ancient European myth of Hyperboreans inhabiting the outermost edge of the world and on the other builds on the indigenous knowledge about people who wear bearskins, feed on raw meat and live far off in the North, a realm unknown to West Greenlanders. The nexus of references stretches at the same time to the cradle of European civilisation with its grand narratives and to the Greenlandic oral tradition of telling stories of their ancestors by the light of fish-oil lamps when a storm is raging outside or the polar night has set in. Evoking both tale species simultaneously, the subject locates himself in-between the two stories, with the meaning of his own narrative similarly finely poised as “neither the one nor the other.”209
The journey to North Greenland is motivated by sentimental reasons that guide the European traveller. His innocence is highlighted by the fairy-tale nature of both tales: one heard from an old Greenlandic woman and the other produced by the narrator. Although he is already a grown-up male, he still resembles a young boy, who mirrors young Marlow in Heart of Darkness with his curiosity about the “blank spaces” on the map of the world and his urge to pursue his dreams of distant journeys and meetings with exotic, non-European Others in order to re-assert his own expectations and beliefs.210 Such journeying, ←70 | 71→which Syed Manzurul Islam labels “sedentary travel,”211 indeed institutes a rigid boundary between the Other and the knowing subject, immobilising the latter in its self-sufficiency.212 Such positioning leads to othering, a process based on essentialisation and the binary frame.213 The aims of Rasmussen’s traveller, which are presented as an innocent aspiration to capture otherness in the form of knowledge and patently unrelated to the goals of Eurocolonial expansion, inscribe the narrative about the original reason behind the expedition to the space inhabited by the mythical “new people” into the discursive paradigm of “anti-conquest.” This paradigm is expressed in a craving “for a way of taking possession without subjugation and violence,”214 where narrative is relied on for subordinating non-European subjects – despite or, rather, due to the obtrusive passivity and innocence of the western traveller.215 It results in a story entitled The New People, the foreword to which is the first of many inscriptions the narrator will perform upon the Inughuit people and the area of North Greenland.
The traveller’s yearning for the mythologised Other, however, expresses something more than just an aspiration of the remote and immobilised subject to give meaning to a non-European people in the guise of anti-conquest ideology. The subject’s utterance is split in itself, which comes to light when “the call of the other” surfaces in the narrator’s reflective retrospection.216 This call, which is first heard as an old Greenlandic woman is spinning her tale, becomes part of the narrator’s past experience and present moment, in which the Inughuit are still vivid in his mind, which is why he wants to meet them face to face. The discursivised presence of the Other makes the traveller mobile and directs him towards North Greenland. This shows that interaction is possible and, consequently, that it is possible to transcend “the paranoia of othering that represents the other in relation to oneself,” thus portending the viability of “nomadic travel,” during which the stiff boundary dividing the subject and the object will be demolished.217 Productive of his epistemological position, the journey of the foreword’s narrator to North Greenland may thus equally be an upshot of the ←71 | 72→shared past of the Other and the European subject and a project expressive of the passage of mutual experience from the past to the present.218
3 North Greenland and the Inughuit as the Other
North Greenland becomes a “new world” for Rasmussen’s narrator many years before he physically crosses the boundary between the parts of Greenland colonised by Denmark and the “no man’s land” in the north, where his narrative of the expedition commences. “We had reached our goal!”219 the European traveller announces triumphantly in the first sentence of his account, without explaining why he finds himself in this unknown area in the first place.
His joy is tarnished because one of his companions falls terminally ill and the natives, on meeting whom the success of the expedition hinges, are nowhere in sight. The travellers only come across recently abandoned “strange, primitive human dwellings”220 of the Inughuit, which makes them feel that they have come into contact with something unknown and new. The former dwellers apparently could not have gone far away because their tracks are only slightly covered in snow, and a big, yet-ungutted seal is found behind one of the snow huts. The narrator makes a poetic pause to reminisce about a legend an old Greenlander from the island’s western part once told him about a man who had lived north of all the settlements and who, like the travellers themselves now, had come across traces of strangers and freshly deserted dwellings several times, without ever seeing their inhabitants.
The inclusion
