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Sea Voyages into Time and Space: Postmodern Topographies in Umberto Eco's "L'isola del Giornoprima" and Christoph Ransmayr's "Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis" Author(s): Beate Müller Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 95, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 1-17Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3736366Accessed: 18-03-2015 17:43 UTC

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JANUARY VOL. 95 PART I

SEA VOYAGES INTO TIME AND SPACE:

POSTMODERN TOPOGRAPHIES IN UMBERTO EGO'S

L'ISOLA DEL GIORNO PRIMA AND CHRISTOPH RANSMAYR'S

DIE SCHRECKEN DES EISES UND DER FINSTERNIS

Cont mporary fiction shows a revived interest in the theme of the sea voyage of exploration. I need only point to Sten Nadolny's Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit (1983), Christoph Ransmayr's Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (I984), John Barth's The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor ( I99 ), or Umberto Eco's most recent novel, L'isola del giorno prima ( 994).1 These novels are postmodern reworkings of the

stereotypical seafaring tale: they offer very different aesthetic, ideological, and epistemological approaches to the literary tradition they revisit. Two patterns emerge: either the tradition of seafaring tales is negated by treating its stereotypes in ajocular, ironical, and self-reflexive fashion, thus bringing about a distancing effect, or historical instances are fictionalized in order to challenge the traditional literature on adventures at sea as well as the political and ideological issues connected with the (literary and non-literary) representation of exploration. The above novels by Barth and Eco serve as examples of the more intra-literary, playful response to the tradition, whereas Nadolny's and Ransmayr's books exemplify more serious investigations of the literary depiction of history. However, postmodern seafaring tales have one thing in common: they use their revisitings of the tradition as a platform for meta-literary reflection.

In my analysis, I concentrate on Eco's L'isola del giorno prima and on Ransmayr's Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, showing how they use their seafaring plots for meta-literary reflections by giving a metaphorical dimension to their topographies of exploration.

In these two seafaring tales, reflections on time are central. These are bound up with the figure of the explorer who sets out to solve either spatial or temporal problems: for example, the discovery of unknown lands, or the mystery of longitude. The linked concepts of time and space2 become both the medium and the object of psychological, philosophical, and meta-textual meditations. For in embarking on a voyage, not only does the adventurer change his coordinates on a geographical map, but his voyage can also be regarded as a journey into the 'interior', providing

' I have used these editions and English translations: Eco, L'isola del giorno prima (Milan: Bompiani, 1994), trans. by William Weaver as The Island of the Day Before (London: Minerva, 1996); Ransmayr, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1996), trans. byJohn E. Woods as The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991). Quotations are from the original, with additional page references to the corresponding passages in the translations given in square brackets.

2 For a detailed analysis of how and why we perceive time in spatial terms, see Boris A. Uspenskij, Semiotik der Geschichte (Vienna: Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1991), pp. 5-63, esp. pp. 24-26. Uspenskij argues that man is active with regard to space but passive with regard to time, and the primary experience of

space informs one's perception of the more abstract notion of time. For a recent literary treatment of this subject, see the introductory chapter ofBotho StrauB's novel Derjunge Mann (Munich: Hanser, 1984), esp. pp. 7, I4-15.

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Sea Voyages into Time and Space

the means of exploring the self, wider philosophical issues, and the aesthetic construction (and structure) of the literary text.3 The voyages themselves result in a stasis, and it is precisely this still-life character of the narrated world that symbolizes the 'exhaustion' of the traditional seafaring tale. Both Eco and Ransmayr ironically reverse direction by making literal stasis the prerequisite of an aesthetic escape: narrative 'replenishment' through stage-managed self-reflexivity.4 But they represent different strategies employed in contemporary literature to regain originality: Eco's (stereotypically postmodern) playful irony contrasts with Ransmayr's melancholy, even sombre reflections. In both novels, the voyages into time and space serve as metaphorical illustrations of a postmodern aesthetics that attempts to overcome exhausted aesthetic conventions by rewriting the traditions concerned.

Neither the search for aesthetic renewal nor the quest motif of the sea voyage is an invention of postmodernism; Robinson Crusoe, Captain Ahab and Ishmael, as well as Marlow obviously explore more than a desert island, the oceans, and the Congo. But although Eco's and Ransmayr's seafaring tales inscribe themselves within an established literary tradition, they are different from their forerunners in many respects. For example, by contrast with the self-affirming adventurers of the genre's classics, the protagonists of their postmodern equivalents are increasingly questioning (and questioned). It is true that Captain Ahab and Kurtz are described critically by Ishmael and Marlow too, but they still come across as fascinating 'man-gods', both awful and awesome. The narrator-figures belong to the same diegetic world as those whom they depict, and this shared context effectively reduces narrative distance so that the reader, through identification with the narrator, is drawn into the adventurous worlds of the texts.

By comparison, Eco's and Ransmayr's protagonists are pygmies. One of the functions of the heterodiegetic omniscient narrators of these texts is even to deconstruct the notion of the hero, an effect brought about by discouraging identification and encouraging critical distance, irony, and laughter. The latter-day nature of the narrator is emphasized, thus highlighting ideological, epistemological, and other differences between the narrator-figure and the historically more remote characters and incidents. The clash of heterogeneous worlds is used to build up dissension and discontinuity between the narrated past and the present of narration, and of reception.5

The stories are set in times past. That in itself is hardly surprising; the scope for a sea voyage of discovery, at least in a literal sense, has long been exhausted. Science and technology have made redundant traditional explorations of the great unknown. Accordingly, L'isola delgiorno prima is (mainly) set in I643. It is also removed in space: Eco's shipwrecked hero Roberto della Griva, sent on a mission to discover the secret of longitude, is stranded on a deserted ship off a Pacific island on the date meridian.

3 Axel Gellhaus has pointed to the metaphorical nature of journeys, which serve as spatial metaphors for processes of insight ('Das allmahliche Verblassen der Schrift: Zur Prosa von Peter Handke und Christoph Ransmayr', Poetica, 22.1/2 (1990), 106-42 (p. 106)). 4 The terms 'exhaustion' and 'replenishment' are drawn from John Barth's ground-breaking essays on the subject: 'The Literature of Exhaustion', Atlantic Monthly (August I967), 29-34, and 'The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction', Atlantic Monthly (June 1980), 65-7 .

5 Therefore, Norma Bouchard's view that 'Eco is representing the seventeenth century as a foil to the twentieth' is only one side of the coin ('Umberto Eco's L'isola del giorno prima: Postmodern Theory and Fictional Praxis', Italica, 72.2 (1995), I93-208 (p. I99)).

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Ransmayr's novel recounts the story of the historical Austrian Payer-Weyprecht Expedition of I872-74 to find the North-East Passage. It is not coincidence that both novels' settings are 'marginal topologies':6 I shall show that their borderline topography is connected with, and symbolic of, the threefold exploration taking place: of the physical, the philosophical, and the meta-literary world.7 The settings are extreme ones because of their geographical remoteness and the living conditions they inflict on the protagonists. This is obvious in the case of the North Pole, but after a fashion it is also true of the particular location in which Eco's hero is placed.

In the opening lines of the novel, Roberto describes his singular situation as a shipwrecked man on a deserted ship: 'sono, credo, a memoria d'uomo, l'unico essere della nostra specie ad averfatto naufragio su di una nave deserta' (p. 5; [I]; Eco's italics). This ship, the Daphne, is lying between an island and what seems to be a larger geological formation, and although there are plenty of provisions on board, and although the climate is friendly, Roberto is in an extraordinary position: there is land within sight, but no longboat on board, and he himself is unable to swim. The ship, traditionally a means of transport endangered by the whims of the sea it traverses, has become a static shelter, and its very immobility gradually turns the ship into a treacherous refuge, for the initially bountiful supply of food, fauna, and flora is running out: the secularized version of Noah's Ark is not really safeguarding the life on board. On the contrary, it symbolizes a topsy-turvy world: here, ships do not sail and explorers are bereft of 'human agency'.8 The ship is basically in control of the situation: not only does it seem to contain a confusing number of intricately arranged rooms, closets, and cabins that seem like a maze to Roberto, it also resembles a magnet, attracting the passenger to its planks, thus assuming the power of a metasubject.

Where exactly this floating prison might be anchored is a question discussed by Roberto and his friend-to-be Father Caspar Wanderdrossel, a German Jesuit who turns out to be trapped on board as well. In Father Caspar's view, the Daphne lies between the sixteenth and seventeenth degrees of latitude south and at one hundred and eighty degrees of longitude. He (wrongly) identifies this as the location of the Solomon Islands, so named and located, he thinks, because the one hundred and eightieth meridian divides the earth into two halves, which parallels Solomon's judgement on the baby. What follows is a series of conjectures about the exact whereabouts of the protagonists, none of which turns out to be true. Despite Father Caspar's rather dubious geographical conclusions, the latter-day narrator-figure does not want to give up the idea that the story takes place on the one hundred and eightieth meridian, because 'altrimenti perde ogni sapore' (p. 241; [259]). So, after laborious speculation, he comes up with the idea of setting the story on our one hundred and eightieth meridian (counted from Greenwich), which would have the

6 See Reingard Nethersole's analysis of the functions of marginality in Ransmayr's novel ('Marginal Topologies: Space in Christoph Ransmayr's Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis', Moder Austrian Literature, 23.3/4 (1990), '35-53)-

7 Franco Moretti points out that there is a correlation between space, plot, and figurality: 'The crossing of a spatial border is usually also the decisive event of the narrative structure', and 'tropes increase near the border' (Atlas of the European Novel i800-Igoo (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 46). Moretti is chiefly interested in geographical borders, but as far as Eco's and Ransmayr's novels are concerned, 'border' also has the figurative dimension of metaphorical thresholds or 'frontiers'.

8 On the postmodern impossibility of human agency, see Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism/Reading Modernism (London: Arnold, 1992), p. 5 , andpassim.

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Daphne anchored off the Fiji Islands, at the island of Taveuni. But soon we learn that this theory does not hold water either, because Roberto's data place the island on the wrong side of the meridian. In the end, the locational chaos is resolved by deconstructing the notion of a geographically identifiable setting: La verita e che coi dati che ci comunica Roberto non e possibile appurare dove fosse finita la Daphne. [...]

L'unica nostra consolazione e che tutti questi arzigogoli sono assolutamente irrilevanti dal punto di vista del nostro incerto romanzo. Quello che padre Wanderdrossel dice a Roberto e che essi sono sul centottantesimo meridiano che e l'antipodo degli antipodi, e li sul centottantesimo meridiano ci sono non le nostre isole Salomone, ma la sua Isola di Salomone. Che importa poi che essa ci sia o non ci sia? [. . .]

Pertanto: la Daphne si trovava di fronte al centottantesimo meridiano, proprio alle Isole di Salomone, e l'Isola nostra era - tra le Isole di Salomone - la piu salomonica, come salomonico e il mio verdetto, onde tranciare una volta per tutte. (pp. 241-42; [260] )

So what first appears to be an extremely restricted, regionally defined, marginal space is opened up; the parochialism often associated with postmodernism is overcome by replacing the spatial real-world referent with an explicitly fictional, imaginary space. The jocular treatment of the setting indicates that the narrator is not seriously interested in an investigation of exploration or scientific progress. Although he is aware of an objective reality beyond literature, he asserts his independence by creating a posited, textual reality. However, this turn towards the realm of fiction does not represent a new cult of subjectivity because of the ostensible juxtaposition of both worlds: rather than ignoring the reader's rationalistic background and the reality beyond the text, the narrator evokes those paradigms, and then ironically negates their validity for his story, thus emphasizing the autonomy of literature without presenting it as escapism.

This carefully built-up spatial imprecision is paralleled by a deliberate under- mining of the idea of temporal precision. That the ship should be caught on the date meridian is a case in point: it is caught in a frozen moment between yesterday and today, a state of limbo in which instability is implicitly accentuated. Moreover, while discussing from where God could have taken enough water to bring about the Great Flood, Father Caspar comes up with a rather unusual theory: God simply took all of yesterday's water, poured it into today's world, and by repeating this action over and over again, doubled the amount of water on earth for forty consecutive days, et voila, the flood. The very fact that the cleric has recourse to a contrived scientific explanation, rather than displaying an attitude of pious belief in the miraculous ways of the Almighty, reduces rationalistic logic ad absurdum. Roberto's question is an obvious one: 'Ma dove prendeva Dio l'acqua di ieri, se ieri era gia passato?' (p. 245; [264]). Beyond the one hundred and eightieth meridian, the Jesuit imagines. For east of this date meridian, just beyond the Daphne, it would still be Thursday, say, while west of it, Friday would have begun. The divine manipulation of the water would not have affected the earth's gravity either, if we follow the logic of Father Caspar: 'Tu pensi con la humana conceptione del tempo. Per noi huomini existe lo ieri non piu, e il domani non ancora. Tempus Dei, quod dicitur Aevum, molto diverso.'

Roberto ragionava che se Dio toglieva l'acqua di ieri e la poneva oggi, forse la terra di ieri aveva una succussione per via di quel dannato centro di gravita, ma agli uomini questo non doveva importare: nel loro ieri la succussione non c'era stata, e aweniva invece in un ieri di Dio, che evidentemente sapeva maneggiare diversi tempi e diverse storie, come un Narratore

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che scriva diversi romanzi, tutti con gli stessi personaggi, ma facendo loro accadere vicende diverse da storia a storia. (p. 247-48; [267])

Several aspects of this statement are worth pointing out. First, two different time concepts are put forward, the human and the divine. For each of these, different laws apply. This means that time is not an absolute given. People, it is implied, are tied to the irreversible chronology of past, present, and future. According to Uspenskij, this corresponds to the historical concept of time, a consciousness characterized by organizing past events in a causal chain so that the present appears to be the result of the past (p. i8). By contrast, God is able to overcome the temporal order of things, and he can move freely through space as well. Thus, in Eco's novel, yesterday has gone somewhere else, to a place where it is inaccessible for the characters, but not for God. (And if one reads God as a metaphor, his sovereignty over time and space symbolizes the emancipated postmodern consciousness that sets out to break free from temporal and spatial confines, as Roberto will exemplify later.) During the forty days' preparation of the Great Flood, God is always going backwards and forwards in time, thus returning to a kind of original situation, a water reservoir suitable for his purposes, the spring of the flood that is going to drown the sinners. This divine overriding of time can be linked with Uspenskij's cosmological concept of time in which the events are seen as being related to an initial condition, the emanation of which affects all subsequent events in the sense that these original events are repeated in the more recent ones.9

A second interesting aspect of the above quotation is its meta-literary dimension. God's sovereignty over time and place is equated with that of a narrator who is the creator of the fictional worlds over which he is the absolute ruler; the fact that the word 'Narratore' is spelt with a capital 'n' underlines the attribution of divine creative powers to him. Just like God, who (if we follow Father Caspar) had to resort to a manipulation of time to bring about the desired flood, the narrator's somewhat contrived story displays numerous stage-managed self-justifications and reflections on the art of writing, which efface the reader's willing suspension of disbelief and highlight the nature of the tale as an aesthetic construct or artefact. Just as God recycles yesterday's water, the narrator is replenishing his tale by alluding to and quoting traditional narrative forms: yesterday's forms in today's literature.

This is obvious when we consider how Roberto's diary entries and letters are used. The narrator quotes from them, but discusses them sceptically, even mockingly, thus undermining the literary convention of the narrator who uses letters, accounts, and the like to verify his story and to establish his own narrative authority. In this novel, the convention of the narrator's mastery is dissolved, although it is paradoxically his self-conscious reflections on art which restore his authority: not as master of the discourse but as puppeteer.?' Mannerisms and ironic revisitings of the past, both typical of the postmodern 'will to art' (or 'Kunstwollen'), coexist. Irony and distance are brought about by a playfully incongruous mix of

9 See Uspenskij, p. 18. Obviously, this concept of time has an affinity to myth. 10 One of the earliest novels in English literature to lay bare the cranking of narrative machinery through

explicit meta-literary reflections of the narrator figure is Sterne's Tristram Shandy. In so far as this parody of

novel-writing is as heavily plotted and artistic as it is playful and self-reflexive, it seems to be a forerunner of some of today's postmodern practices.

ll See Eco, Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose', trans. by William Weaver (London: Seeker & Warburg, 985), pp. 66-67.

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spatial, temporal, and above all intertextual dimensions. Bouchard has rightly pointed out the 'polyphonic construction' of Eco's novel.12 This intertextual juxtaposition of fragments from, and allusions to, diverse genres and conventions creates a 'chambre d'echos'13 that accentuates historical distance between the narrated world and the world in which narrator and reader are at home.

These historical retrospectives become carefully arranged voyeuristic gazings into alien worlds and minds. However, the looking-glass has its cracks: the protagonists, caught up in their sometimes pathetic struggles and endeavours, puzzle and amuse, even intrigue us, but their quests and obsessions remain ultimately alien. A good example is the way in which Roberto's quest for longitude is motivated. In Chapter 17, Roberto is arrested and charged with treason. These charges lack all foundation; their purpose is simply to enable Cardinal Mazarin to blackmail Roberto, whose choice is death or to embark on a mission to discover the secret of longitude. Roberto is believed to be a suitable candidate for that particular mission because he has been overheard talking knowledgeably about the powder of sympathy, or weapon salve, which was supposed to be a potential aid in determining longitude. The irony here is that Roberto does not really know much about the 'polvere di simpatia' but had just been repeating, in an attempt to entertain a party of people, the account given by his friend d'Igby. So second-hand knowledge (worse, parrotted knowledge), stage-managed to impress others, not the well-founded first- hand knowledge of the scientist, brings about Roberto's arrest. He goes on board the Amaryllis in order to spy on the experiments concerning longitude conducted by his fellow passenger Dr Byrd. Paradoxically, that mystery is not unveiled through the traditional scientific, experimental endeavours of the explorer: the Amaryllis sinks in a storm, and it is only after drifting in the ocean, clinging to a plank, that Roberto chances upon the Daphne, safely anchored (so the story goes) on the date meridian. And to a modern audience, Father Caspar is a caricature of the scientist, an eccentric man of the Church whose experiments fail, with the last of them bringing about his death as he tries to walk ashore on the seabed, travelling in his fatal 'Campana Acquatica' (see the aptly named Chapter 25: 'Technica Curiosa'). Neither the zeal of the classical adventurer or explorer nor the curiosity and perseverance of pioneering scientists (nor, indeed, the purposeful determination that characterizes both of these types) does the trick. By implication, knowledge is no dormant treasure waiting to be uncovered by Mr Right. In a wonderfully parodic passage, the basic epistemological problem of the hermeneutic circle is exposed by Roberto, who, in a discussion about determining longitude using Father Caspar's 'Specola Melitense', asks the cleric:

'Ma, reverendo padre, voi mi avete detto che la Specola Melitense vi ha confermato che siete sul meridiano antipodo, e io ci credo. Ma non siete andato a innalzar la specola su ogni isola che avete incontrato nel vostro viaggio, bensi su questa soltanto. E allora in qualche modo, prima che la Specola ve lo dicesse, voi dovevate gia essere sicuro di aver trovato la longitudine che cercavate!'

12 'The novel exemplifies formal "openness" by playfully trafficking with the texts common to the baroque culture. It abounds in quotations from the treatises of scientists, astronomers, and philosophers of the seventeenth century, as well as from the more mundane works of lyric poetry in the tradition of European Petrarchism [.. .] such as Gongora, Gracian, and Marino. The novel also alludes to the chivalric romances, Cervantes's Don Quixote [.. .], the baroque novels of M.lle de Scudery, Renaissance treatises, Rabelais's works [.. .], and much more' (Bouchard, pp. 205, 202).

13 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthespar Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 78.

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'Tu pensi molto giusto. Se io qui sarei venuto senza sapere che qui era qui, non potevo io sapere che ero qui ... Ora ti spiego. Siccome sapevo che la Specula era l'unico instrumento giusto, per arrivare dove provare la Specula, dovevo falsi metodi usare. Et cosi ho facto.' (pp. 259-60 [280])

Later in the novel, Roberto uses 'wrong methods' too, in order to create an alternative, fictional, world to suit his aim of escaping from the ship. He starts to write a novel, imagining the death of Ferrante (his phantom evil brother) and his own reunion with his beloved Lilia. It is Lilia's imagined death that seems to require Roberto's intervention, albeit in the real world (or, rather, his world). He is

displeased with the ending of his own romance: Lilia had been sailing on a boat with the villain Ferrante, to whom she (having been deceived in love) had given herself. That ship was deservedly destroyed by a storm, Ferrante got himself killed into the bargain, and the shipwrecked Lilia was cast upon a small rock off'alla costa occidentale dell'Isola di Salomone, e cioe dalla parte opposta a quella in cui era ancorata la Daphne' (p. 456; [492]). In other words: she is just out of sight and dying of exhaustion. And Roberto 'doveva averla spossessandosi di se' (p. 458; [495]). So, in an attempt to rescue Lilia, he decides that he will enter the story himself. He reasons: 'Io la vedo spirare in questo stesso momento, ma se io in questo stesso momento raggiungessi l'Isola, vi sarei un giorno prima ch'essa vi arrivi, pronto ad attenderla e trarla a salvamento' (p. 459; [496]).

Roberto confuses fact and fiction. Having become an author, he refuses to acknowledge the divide between the two worlds, and thus applies Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief to his own life, as well as to the fictional story he has written. The medium of literature has its own demands, at odds with, but not without impact on, non-literary reality, and this is Roberto's true discovery. Ultimately, his travels lead him neither to cross the border between today and yesterday nor to overcome any significant spatial boundaries, but he does bridge the rift between life and art. For him, the two merge. Paradoxically, this will presumably prove to be fatal for him, although it sounds like a promising attempt on his part to equip his romance with a suitably romantic ending. In trying to rescue Lilia, he acts like the traditional chivalric hero, only to show how much that figure is doomed. Reality catches up with him, despite his attempts to subordinate it to his will. Once again, Eco's novel uses a traditional concept and employs it against itself.

Beneath Roberto's intention to unite with Lilia is his wish to reach eternity by drifting along the date meridian, thus 'fermandosi il tempo per lui' (p. 462; [500] ), for ever surfing on the time-space continuum. Still unable to swim, he sets fire to the ship in order to force himself to leave his shelter for good. He literally 'burns his boat', and his fate remains blurred. By virtue of its imprecision with regard to the

spatial and temporal coordinates of the protagonist's disappearance, the story becomes potentially mythical.

No closure is offered to the reader. On the contrary, the last chapter of the novel discusses two equally improbable hypotheses as to how Roberto's manuscript was obtained, thus toying with the reader's credulity, admitting that in novels 'dove, si, si fa finta di raccontar cose vere, ma non si deve dire sul serio che si fa finta' (p. 473; [513]). Here, the fictionality of the entire story is accentuated. This explicit self- reflexivity parodies the authoritative and reliable narrator-figure created through narrative frames, a device frequently employed, for example, in nineteenth century German novellas. Postmodernism plays with literary forms, and all the cards are

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put on the table: the reader has to face the game and consciously play his part in it. The notion of narrative omniscience is unveiled as a fictional conceit, and paradoxically, it is this honesty that restores some of the reader's faith in this author and his narrator, who not only realize the exhaustion of claims to authenticity but also find a creative way out by reflecting on such notions of authenticity and narrative omnipotence. Through this meta-literary level, the wider epistemological issues of knowability and intersubjective verifiability are raised. The novel undermines its own construction in its postmodern play on the conventions of, for instance, adventure stories, travel literature, the Bildungsroman, and historiography. In doing so, the novel regains literary creativity. Explorers and seafarers, the archetypal hero-figures, are dead, their narrator(s) alive.

Although Ransmayr's novel also features a somewhat intrusive, ostensibly late- twentieth century narrator, it is different in unfolding not one but two seafaring stories. These are functionalized in order to combine the self-reflexive and the historical mode, the conjuncture of which, according to Linda Hutcheon, is one of the most significant defining characteristics of postmodernism.14 For the historical strand of the Payer-Weyprecht Expedition intersects with the fictitious one of Mazzini, and it is the way these two stories reflect on each other that provides ample occasion for the narrator to reflect on the underlying epistemological and ideological issues bound up with the plot motif of exploration. In questioning the negative sides of historical expeditions into extreme territories (such as false ambition, loss of life), the narrator challenges established idealizing modes of representing such enter- prises, thus providing an ultimately aesthetic perspective on an essentially political theme.

Although separated by more than a hundred years, Ransmayr's two plots are linked by the figure of Mazzini, who sets out to follow in the footsteps of the historical expedition. Josef Mazzini is an idiosyncratic outsider of Italian-Austrian origin and 'eine fluchtige Bekanntschaft' (p. 24; [I3]) of the narrator. The two meet at a social gathering organized by Anna Koreth, a Viennese bookseller specializing in ethno-historical travel literature. In this context, Mazzini confronts Anna's guests with his project: inventing the past. The narrator reports: Er entwerfe, sagte Mazzini, gewissermaBen die Vergangenheit neu. Er denke sich Ge- schichten aus, erfinde Handlungsablaufe und Ereignisse, zeichne sie aufund prtife am Ende, ob es in der fernen oder jtingsten Vergangenheit jemals wirkliche Vorlaufer oder Entspre- chungen fur die Gestalten seiner Phantasie gegeben habe. Das sei, sagte Mazzini, im Grunde nichts anderes als die Methode der Schreiber von Zukunftsromanen, nur eben mit umgekehrter Zeitrichtung. So habe er den Vorteil, die Wahrheit seiner Erfindungen durch geschichtliche Nachforschungen uberprufen zu konnen. Es sei ein Spiel mit der Wirklichkeit. Er gehe aber davon aus, daB, was immer er phantasiere, irgendwann schon einmal stattgefunden haben musse. (p. 20; [ I] )

In these lines, the programme of the entire novel is laid out. For the book presents a story that blurs not only the distinction between fact and fiction, life and art, but also that between past and present. These paired notions are seen not as separate but as informing and relativizing each other. And they revolve around two key concepts that occur in the quoted statement: reality and truth.

14 The Politics ofPostmodernism (1989) (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 7.

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The irreversibility of temporal sequence, as well as the separation of past, present, and future, is usually taken for granted, a natural law that cannot be influenced by man. However, Mazzini intends to reinvent the past, a creative process that would of necessity start in the present and extend into the future, and would then mould the past. In so far as he wants to find a past reality to match his invention, he is looking for a historical reflection of his fantasies that would legitimize them as 'true'. His reinterpretation results not merely in a suspension of time but in a chronological reversal, an accomplishment achieved by turning to imagination and fictionaliza- tion. Of course, literature frequently depicts things past, but Mazzini's plan is special because it implies the transcendence of the realm of literature by merging it with the factual and non-literary, thus attributing the same epistemological status to history and fiction.

One of the means employed to fictionalize life and defictionalize art is that of juxtaposing textual layers: Ransmayr's narrator describes both Mazzini's fate and that of the Payer-Weyprecht Expedition by drawing on diaries, quoting from both the invented 'Eismeertagebuch' of his fictional Mazzini and the historical diaries written by several equally historical participants of the expedition. Not for nothing does the diary figure so prominently in the novel, given the hybrid character of this genre: it is a personal account, written with a view to documentation but foregoing objectivity because of its individualist perspective and its affinity with subjective impressions. Between these intertextual fragments, the narrator embellishes, comments, draws conclusions, criticizes, rewrites, and speculates so that a poly- phonic text is created. And although the novel's conceit lies in its transparent pretence that it is pursuing historical truth, both distant and immediate, it is clear that the very similarity between the fates of the fictitious Mazzini and those nineteenth-century figures he follows sheds an ironic light on the narrator's alleged search for the 'authentic'. Rather than present a complete and definitive story, the narrator indicates that he is interested in the possibilities and potentialities of his narrative: So ordne ich, was mir an Hinweisen zur Verfugung steht, fulle Leerstellen mit Vermutungen aus und empfinde es am Ende einer Indizienkette doch als Willkur, wenn ich sage: So war es. Mazzinis Abreise erscheint mir dann als ein Hinuberwechseln aus der Wirklichkeit in die Wahrscheinlichkeit. (p. 62; [391)

Towards the end, the narrator proclaims: 'Ich werde nichts beenden und nichts werde ich aus der Welt schaffen' (p. 26 ; [ 97] ), and in the concluding lines of the novel, he is standing 'inmitten meiner papierenen Meere, allein mit allen Moglichkeiten einer Geschichte, ein Chronist, dem der Trost des Endes fehlt' (p. 263; [I 98]). He could not have spelt out any more clearly that he is seeking not the traditional closure but the creation of a multitude of perspectives. It is precisely the rupture of totalizing modes of representation, the implosion in favour of a Foucauldian 'dispersing interplay of different, heterogeneous discourses' (Hutcheon, p. 66) that provides the basis for reflection on historiographic re-presentations, whether fictional or non-fictional. For instance, the simple fact that the diary entries by the crew members Brosch, Payer, and Krisch specify different arrival dates in Tromso is used by the narrator in order to hint at much more profound differences of perception, experience, and representation of the same empirical events: Es gibt [.. .] untrugliche Indizien fur ein objektives Datum der Ankunft, aber ich lasse sie unerwahnt. Denn wirklicher als im BewuBtsein eines Menschen, der ihn durchlebt hat, kann

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ein Tag nicht sein. Also sage ich: Die Expedition erreichte am zweiten, erreichte am dritten, erreichte am vierten Juli 1872 Tromso. Die Wirklichkeit ist teilbar. (Auch in der kleinen Gesellschaft an Bord der Tegetthoff waren die Journale der Untertanen von denen der Befehlshaber so verschieden, daB es manchmal schien, als wurde in den Kojen und Kajiiten nicht an einer einzigen, sondern an der Chronik mehrerer, einander ganz fremder Expeditionen geschrieben. Jeder berichtete aus einem anderen Eis.) (p. 4I; [24])

At first sight, it might seem astonishing that a mundane matter such as differences in dating should have been used to motivate these reflections, but this very triviality indicates that if there are deviations in the crew members' accounts of the expedition even on this basic level of date, surely those differences will be the more considerable the more complex the issues depicted are. Thus, the concept of a transindividually binding view of reality gives way to a subjective one, in which absolute factual truth is less significant than personal perception, and might sometimes even be unattainable. Instead of conveying a reliable, 'mono-logic' picture of the expedition, the narrator compares and contrasts individual diary entries, as well as speculating about what might have been.

If the epistemological divide between the real and the possible collapses, the realm of the possible emancipates itself as the object of historiography.15 In

becoming changeable and negotiable, the past loses its aura of a distant but somehow recoverable historical world, the representation of which would work

along the paradigms of 'true' and 'false', or 'right' and 'wrong', depending on whether something can be regarded as a fact (and therefore be 'true' and 'right'), or whether it has to be seen as speculative (and can therefore claim no truth-value). At the heart of this dichotomy, which Ransmayr's novel challenges, is the common

assumption that there is such a thing as 'a' past, thought of as a real-world referent, an object of interest that is by definition absent but can, in principle, be discovered and represented (or re-presented) through historiography.

Since information about times past is mostly of a textual nature, there is no such

thing as an immediately, directly accessible historical fact: 'All past "events" are

potential historical "facts", but the ones that become facts are those that are chosen to be narrated', Hutcheon rightly points out (Hutcheon, p. 75). All texts contain narrative elements and demand interpretation. Therefore, historiography and literature are different in degree only, not in essence.16 Monika Schmitz-Emans's claim that any thematization of past events brings with it a process of invention

might sound sweeping, but is nevertheless correct if 'invention' is understood to include the selection, organization, and composition of material (Schmitz-Emans, p. 306). It is not enough to conceive of postmodern literature as being characterized

by a 'paradoxical confrontation of self-consciously fictive and resolutely historical

representation' (Hutcheon, p. 66). For in this perspective, fiction and historiography

15 See Monika Schmitz-Emans, 'Experimente mit der Zeit: Uber Geschichtliches in Romanen von Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Eco und Raffaele Nigro', Archivfiir das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, I48 (I996), 295-322 (p. 308).

16 See Ernst Voltmer, 'Das Mittelalter ist noch nicht vorbei ... Uber die merkwurdige Wiederentdeckung einer langst vergangenen Zeit und die verschiedenen Wege, sich ein Bild davon zu machen', in Ecos Rosenroman. Ein Kolloquium, ed. by Alfred Haverkamp and Alfred Heit (Munich: dtv, 1987), pp. I85-228 (p. 204).

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are still essentially separate entities, while much of postmodern fiction tries to undermine this very divide.17

In Ransmayr's novel, the depiction of the past becomes a means of meta-literary reflection, a process in the course of which time-layers and narrated worlds become blurred. This is achieved not only by juxtaposing the Mazzini-plot, the historical expedition, and the contemporary narrator's comments, but also by suggesting an identification of the narrator with Mazzini and a similarity between Mazzini and Weyprecht. The narrator says about his relationship to Mazzini:

Nein, ich habe nicht zu seinen Freunden gehort. Ich habe fur diesen kleingewachsenen, fast zierlichen Mann, der wohl auch einer Luftspiegelung mit der Kraft eines Fanatikers gefolgt ware, manchmal sogarjene besondere Feindseligkeit empfunden, mit der man vielleicht nur jemandem gegeniibertritt, der einem allzu nahe, allzu ahnlich ist. (p. 24; [3] )

After Mazzini has vanished, the narrator gets involved in a 'Gedankenspiel' (p. 24; [14]), a game aimed at finding an explanation for the inexplicable disappearance. The more information he gathers, the more intrigued he becomes by what he first describes as a 'Kreuzwortratsel', and what develops into a case-study: 'Mazzini wurde fur mich zum Fall' (p. 24; [I4] ). At one point, he realizes: 'DaB ich langst in die Welt eines anderen hinubergewechselt war; es war die beschamende, lacherliche

Entdeckung, daB ich gewissermaBen Mazzinis Platz eingenommen hatte: Ich tat ja seine Arbeit und bewegte mich in seinen Phantasien so zwangslaufig wie eine

Brettspielfigur' (p. 24; [14]). The narrator traces Mazzini's journey in his mind

only, but in doing so becomes increasingly involved in the case, as the metaphors used in the above quotations show: from engaging in a 'game' and 'crossword

puzzle', he himself advances to becoming a 'piece in a board game': that is, he loses control over the game. And the spatial metaphors (taking up residence, taking Mazzini's place) suggest the immobility of a prolonged stay.

In contrast to the narrator's mental and imaginary involvement, Mazzini

physically follows the footsteps of the Austrian expedition. When he flies out to

Longyearbyen, he introduces himself to another passenger as Antonio Scarpa, [. . .] Matrose' (p. 97; [67]). Antonio Scarpa was his great-great-uncle, who took part in the Payer-Weyprecht Expedition. During his stay in Longyearbyen, Mazzini meets several of the locals, who display an attitude of bemused mockery towards his obsession. It is during a game of pool that one of them, Flaherty, says to him: 'Los, Weyprecht, du bist dran' (p. 123; [88] ). In this process of increasing identification with the protagonists of the nineteenth-century expedition, Mazzini undergoes a

development that could almost be described as a regression: he trains hard to learn how to operate Kjetil Fyrand's dog-sleigh, a means of transport ridiculously out of date in an era of helicopters and icebreakers. Secretly, he then sets out on an

expedition with the dogs, never (unlike Payer) to return. In other words, both Mazzini and Roberto try to live out their bookish fantasies, but while Roberto breaks down the barrier between reality and fantasy, Mazzini undoes that between

past and present.

17 Of course, historical facts have been fictionalized before; likewise, fictional accounts have been presented as non-fictional. Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, which pretends to be an eye-witness account of the London plague of 1665, is a case in point. However, Ransmayr's text, while also using historical sources, is different because it does not try to blend or transform them into a coherent narrative but makes them part of a textual mosaic of historical and fictitious sources, as well as narrative comments.

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In both novels, aestheticization is an instrument employed by the characters to achieve their aims, whether this be Roberto's escape into fantasy or Payer's diary entries. For when the Admiral Tegetthoffgets stuck in the ice, drifting north towards more and more unnavigable waters, the thought of death is suppressed, it becomes a mere 'Denkfigur' (p. 86; [58]). Payer imagines death as a picturesque colour- display: Julius Payer entwirft ein Bild. Es ist ebenso unwahrscheinlich wie sanft: Unversehens wurde sich um einen nackten, der arktischen Winterkalte schutzlos ausgesetzten Menschen eine Nebelwolke bilden, dem Mondhof gleich. Bei gtinstigem Lichteinfall wurden die Rander dieser Wolke, die nichts ware als die rasch verdunstende Korperfeuchtigkeit, in den Farben des Regenbogens leuchten: Blauviolett, Blau, Grun, Gelb, Orange und Gelbrot. Das allmahliche Verloschen dieser Farbenbogen, Farbe um Farbe, entsprache den Stadien des Erfrierungstodes; ein Todjenseits der Schmerzgrenze, sichtbar am Verschwinden des letzten, gelbroten Bogens.

Das Sterben, ein Farbenspiel. (pp. 86-87; [58])

This last comment is repeated almost verbatim ('Farbenpracht des Todes' (p. 173)) when Mazzini watches the killing of two seals whose blood crystallizes on the ice in a display of'rich colours' [p. 129]. In this fictional Mazzini strand the death of the seals, and the possibly impending death of the crew as imagined by Payer in the part of the novel that deals with the historical expedition, are described in similar ways. Again, narrative aestheticization emerges as a strategy of coping with events and fears.

Linguistic description becomes a means of 'Weltaneignung', a process of cosmography in which narrative depiction results in intellectual acquisition of what is depicted. For example, this is true for Mazzini's 'Eismeertagebucher': 'Wollte er alle Bilder des Nordens sammeln und sie durch die Abschrift zu seinen eigenen machen?', the narrator muses (p. 177; [132]). Mazzini's acquisition of images is mirrored in the narrator's acquisition of the fictional diaries: Das dunne, blau gebundene Heft, das er damals vollkritzelte, liegt jetzt vor mir; Kjetil Fyrand hat es gemeinsam mit den anderen Aufzeichnungen und der Habe des Verschollenen an Anna Koreth ubersandt. GewiB, es ist nicht Josef Mazzinis Handschrift, die auf dem Umschlagschild den Titel dieser heillosen Sammlung von Zitaten festhalt: Der Grofe Nagel so haben gr6nlandische Eskimos den Nordpol genannt. Es ist nicht Josef Mazzinis Handschrift. Das habe ich geschrieben. Ich. Ich habe auch die anderen Hefte Mazzinis mit Namen versehen. Campi deserti. Terra nuova. Ich bin mit den Aufzeichnungen verfahren, wie jeder Entdecker mit seinem Land, mit namenlosen Buchten, Kaps und Sunden verfahrt ich habe sie getauft. Nichts soll ohne Namen sein. (p. 177; [132] )

Narration and reflection are realized by means of the journey motif. The journey itself, with its explorations and naming of discoveries, becomes a metaphor for the writing process. This is a largely linguistic investigation of the world, stimulated only in part by real topographical features. It is in character with the interior orientation of the journey that the objects of exploration are more or less imaginary. In Eco's novel, it is the desire to discover in the oceans the lines that today mark the degrees of longitude on a globe; in Ransmayr's book, the point where those lines signifying longitude meet, the North Pole, becomes the Promised Land. The other members of the expedition eventually learn from Julius Payer that the North Pole is, to a certain extent, only an intellectual construct: 'Mit schmerzlicher Enttduschung wurde die Lage und der Unwerth von "Nordpolen" vernommen, daft es kein Land sei, kein zu eroberndes Reich, nichts als Linien, die sich in einem Punkte schneiden, und wovon nichts in der

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Wirklichkeit zu sehen sei!' (p. 42; [25] ).18 Thus, the literary sea voyage is a symbolic manifestation of a quest that ultimately serves the exploration of the self and of philosophical issues more than that of an external, worldly unknown.19

As in Eco's novel, the explorers become trapped, a situation that undermines the traditional concept of the (active) hero: the crew of the Admiral Tegetthoff are effectively prisoners of the ice, and it is only thanks to the ice drifting and carrying them with it that they eventually stumble upon Franz-Joseph-Land. The depiction of the involuntary lassitude, captivity, and disorientation experienced by the crew not only shatters heroic notions of exploration, with man emerging victoriously from a battle against nature, but also illustrates a change of attitude to narration. For one could argue that together with the traditional hero who is in control of the action, the traditional omniscient narrator vanishes: after all, it was towards the end of the nineteenth century, at the time of the Payer-Weyprecht Expedition, that this point of view increasingly gave way to more restricted forms of narrative perspective. And while it is true that some contemporary fiction has resuscitated the omniscient narrator, often with a view to practising playful self-irony and meta-literary reflexivity (as is the case with, for instance, Italo Calvino's works), some postmodern literature adopts a critical attitude to totalizing modes of representation; Ransmayr's novel is a case in point. As far as the stories themselves are concerned, neither of the two novels discussed here features any larger-than-life figures. Oddly enough, this dethroning of superman results in a more realistic conception of character, for if the figures are not larger than life, they will be life-size. This is one of the paradoxes of postmodernism, which tries to subvert some of literature's grand narratives but can do so only at the price of an increase in realism. With Eco and Ransmayr, this tendency is counterbalanced by scrupulous metatextual reflection on the part of the story-teller, which in turn tends to highlight the artificiality of the text as construct. This is where the time-space continuum comes in: it can be used on a literal level of sea voyages and exploration, as well as on a meta-literary level.

The two winters on board ship represent a period of suspended animation, a 'bleierne Zeit' (p. 105; [74] ) against which the crew fight to start with (for instance, by occupying themselves with building castles of ice, doing all kinds of repair jobs on the ship, and so on). But in the polar night, the succession of days as well as the rhythm of day and night lose their meaning: 'Es gab keinen sinnlich wahrehmbaren Wechsel der Tage mehr, nur die Aufeinanderfolge des Datums und eine einzige Unterscheidung der Zeit, die vor und nach dem Essen und die des Schlafes' (p. 112; [79]). In other words, segments of time become imperceptible: the captive explorers have to rely on culturally established forms of managing time (the calendar), and they effectively fall back on their own biological rhythm, which is structured by intervals of food and sleep, just as a baby's world would be organized. During their second winter as

18 In the novel, all quotations from historical sources are in italics. 19 In his analysis of travel literature, Christoph Bode points out that once the unknown is understood as being

part of one's own self, preliminary distributions of the 'known' vs the 'unknown', or of'inside' and 'outside' are of a heuristic value only, rather than describing 'real' relations; also, the process of correlating these elements is, in principle, endless: one can never truly find oneself. Bode names Bruce Chatwin's novel In Patagonia as an example of recent travel literature in which the division between the real and the unreal is suspended, with the landscape becoming a mindscape. Thus, the spatial setting represents the correlative of an interior, psychological constitution (Bode, 'Beyond/Around/Into One's Own: Reiseliteratur als Paradigma von Welt- Erfahrung', Poetica 26. /2 (1994), 70-87 (pp. 82-83)).

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prisoners of the ice, they end up repeating their days, and thus time is experienced as circular:

Was immer sie jetzt auch tun - sie haben es schon einmal getan. Sie wiederholen ihre Tage. Die Zeit kreist. [. ..] Und weil alles, was geschieht, nur die Wiederkehr des gleichen ist, geraten sie in ihren Gesprachen immer tiefer in die Vergangenheit. (p. 148; [108-09]) Was geschieht, ist Routine. Und so geschieht nichts. Die Zeit ist ein Tumpel, in dem die Vergangenheit in Blasen nach oben steigt. (p. 158; [ 17] )

This state of suspended animation is mainly but not exclusively induced by the ship's immobility in the thick ice; the polar region itself is presented as an area over which time does not really have a firm grip. For instance, while Mazzini stays in Oslo on his way to Longyearbyen, Oslo is described as 'das Niemandsland [...] zwischen der Gegenwart und der Zeitlosigkeit der arktischen Kulisse' (p. 74; [49]). In the Arctic, the phenomenon of frozen time goes together with a mystical admiration of the most austere extremity of nature. Imagined sea routes across the Arctic are described as a way 'durch alles Chaos und alle Ratsel hindurch UBER DAS EISMEER ins Paradies' (p. 56; [34] ). Weyprecht states: 'Wer die Natur wahrhaft bewundern will, der beobachte sie in ihren Extremen' (p. 103; [72]). And Payer's rational analysis of the discovery of a barren island includes this sentiment: 'Es liegt etwas Erhabenes in der Einsamkeit eines noch unbetretenen Landes, wenngleich dieses Gefihl nur durch unsere Einbildung und den Reiz des Ungewdhnlichen geschaffen wird, und das Schneeland des Poles an sich nicht poetischer sein kann, als Jitland' (p. 154; [i 3]). In other words, it is the imagination that renders the object of exploration special, and it does so by way of viewing the landscape as a poetic mindscape. Thus, the real-world referent is aestheticized, transformed into a world in which spatial or temporal information, as well as the distinction between fact and fantasy, can be creatively manipulated: the world of art.

But the aesthetic approach to (and withdrawal from) life, while offering a strategy of exploring the unknown, does not represent a viable solution to the problems encountered in the course of the exploration: Roberto, despite his fantasies about surfing for ever on the time-space continuum towards unification with Lilia, vanishes, and from the evidence (he sets fire to the ship before leaving it, still unable to swim) he seems to have drowned. This suicidal step, even if seen metaphorically as leaving the world of (rational) reality, suggests a sceptical view of his attempts to impose his will on a recalcitrant reality. Mazzini also disappears without trace, having ventured out on a dog-sleigh. Their fates suggest that these protagonists' endeavours to explore the exotic will lead nowhere: if both the exploration of the physical world and the quest for insight result in the demise of the explorers, the whole enterprise looks dubious, if not futile. Seen from a realistic vantage-point, Roberto and Mazzini fail. But one might also regard their fates more positively, because they eventually follow their calling, striving towards the realization of their desire.

The novels do not offer a final view on Roberto and Mazzini. This is because although the voyages and quests into unknown territories involve physical and philosophical exploration as well as psychological self-experience, there is yet another dimension to them: they also represent an investigation of meta-literary territory. On this level, the protagonists' enterprises appear in a different light because they correspond metaphorically to the reflections of the narrator-figures: it

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is hard to overlook the aesthetic elements of Roberto's romance, Mazzini's 'Eismeertagebiicher', or the diaries written by the crew members of the Admiral Tegetthoff The strong motif of aestheticization would hardly make sense unless we were prepared to read the stories themselves in a meta-literary light. In my view, both novels consider wider aesthetic and philosophical issues than is apparent in their surface texts: nothing less than the future development of literature is discussed.

It is here that time and space find their true function. Figures whose journeys are suspended in time in the middle of nowhere are lost, immobile, helpless. If read on a symbolic level, their voyages and quests also illustrate a search for new aesthetic territories, and the protagonists' deaths symbolize the postmodern rejection of traditional, all-conquering explorer-heroes. But if the adventurers' limbo suggests a dead end for the literature of exploration, where do we go from here? Can the fact that Roberto and Mazzini melt into thin air be read against the grain to indicate that their creators are in a quandary because they do not know which way literature can go now? To answer this question, we need to look at what happens in the novels after the disappearance of the two protagonists: both narrators are musing, once again, about their craft.

In the last chapter of L'isola del giorno prima, the narrator, confronted with a story in which both the end (Roberto's fate) and the beginning (the survival story of Roberto's writings) are missing, wonders whether the story to be told is not of Roberto but of his papers. He concludes that the only way to write is to make a palimpsest of a rediscovered manuscript while never shaking off the resulting 'anxiety of influence': 'Infine, se da questa storia volessi fame uscire un romanzo, dimostrerei ancora una volta che non si puo scrivere se no facendo palinsesto di un manoscritto ritrovato -senza mai riuscire a sottrarsi all'Angoscia dell'Influenza' (p. 473; [512]). In other words, creativity necessitates a consideration and use of other texts; the writer faces the tension arising from this confrontation with the tradition and the urge to keep its influence at bay so as not to stifle his own voice. This passage points to two crucial texts and concepts: Gerard Genette's study of intertextuality and Harold Bloom's theory of poetic creativity and indebtedness.20 The old, old question is how to be original if confronted with a universe of texts in which everything has been done and said before. It is the conflict between Julia Kristeva's radical scepticism as to the possibility that a writing subject can be genuinely original, or Roland Barthes's provocative proclamation of the 'death of the author', and Bloom's view that good literature springs from the creative individual's self-assertion.21 For Bloom, strong poets create an imaginative space for themselves by 'misreading' other poets' works, through a process of self- appropriation that 'involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness' (Bloom, p. 5). If one sees this in the context of postmodernism, the age allegedly suffering from an 'exhaustion' of established literary traditions, one wonders how writers like Eco and Ransmayr address these aesthetic issues and aim for narrative 'replenishment'.

20 Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), trans. by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (i973) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 21 See Kristeva, 'Word, Dialogue and Novel' [1967], in The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (Oxford:

Blackwell, I986), pp. 34-6 ; Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', Image -Music - Text (London: Fontana, I977), PP. 142-48.

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Eco's way out is a strategy that has become a cliche of postmodernism: replenishment through humour, irony, openly intertextual practices, and playful distance between narrator and narrated. His is a novel that is for good reason set in the seventeenth century: Eco's mimicry of the highly decorated and mannered style of baroque literature provides the basis for and target of much of his irony. Thus, the novel exemplifies a typical postmodern predicament which Hutcheon has called an attitude of 'complicitous critique': self-reflexivity born out of the realization of one's own involvement in that which one wants to undermine (Hutcheon, pp. 2, 4).

Ransmayr deals with the situation differently. He advocates a more sombre solution: replenishment through reflection based on compassion and political criticism. Having sent Mazzini out into the darkness, his narrator turns to Payer and Weyprecht in the last chapter, which resembles an obituary. Payer and Weyprecht return from the ice to transient limelight. Weyprecht becomes a severe critic of the experienced inhumane practices of exploration, and dies early, while Payer spends the rest of his life struggling to survive. Financing himself through public lecture tours or private tuition, he becomes a painter and depicts scenes from the eternal ice, first from the fatal Franklin expedition of I847, then increasingly from his own traumatic experience. Interestingly, the life-size figures represented therein begin to resemble those of his comrades from the Admiral Tegetthojf: effectively a homage to realism. So Payer resorts to another medium for coming to terms with his experience: linguistic description is replaced by figural, scenic representation. By implication, this choice of genre suggests that the inevitable sequentiality of language is seen as less capable of capturing and conveying the horrors of the ice than is painting, whose spatial nature is better suited to the task because of the simultaneous presence of the represented elements. Payer, whose diary entries are the most aestheticized and stylized, leaves written depiction behind, and turns to visual signs instead. In showing Payer reviving realistic depiction, Ransmayr's novel reminds me of the Laokoon debate about the advantages and disadvantages of painting and poetry. However, while Lessing demanded perfect illusion from both genres, adhering to the traditional mimetic principle of ut pictura poesis, post- modernism is decidedly against such attempts at hiding the semiotic nature of aesthetic signs. But the last of Ransmayr's protagonists to leave the stage seems to subvert this axiom of postmodern aesthetics. The concluding passages show the narrator (or 'chronicler', as he prefers to call himself) perched awkwardly amidst all the collected material; he is somewhat depressed at the thought of the banality of the assembled facts, which can be rearranged and interpreted in so many different ways. This openness and ambivalence leads to a melancholy finish that belies the fragmentary practices of the novel. It is true that the tentative stance of juxtaposed possibilities represents a potential for replenishment, but this reflective practice at the expense of a rounded story seems to worry one figure most of all: the narrator himself.22 So while both novels stress that they lack a 'proper' ending, Ransmayr's

22 Ransmayr's uneasy, melancholy self-reflexivity goes hand in hand with a much more conservative, almost romantic view of literature and its writers, in which the author highlights and warns his audience against sociopolitical problems. Accordingly, irrespective of all the scepticism of heroism in Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, the partly critical, partly indifferent reaction to Weyprecht and Payer, as well as the adumbrated course of history, with the decline of the Habsburg monarchy and the outbreak of the First World War, lead the narrator to suggest that Payer ought to have realized then that they did, after all, discover a paradise in the

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narrator does not revel in that fact, contrary to Eco's bemused and relaxed manipulator of yarns.

Neither of the two novels paints heroism and exploration in roseate hue, but their plots evoke a tradition that is then employed against itself. Implicitly, the novels put literal exploration in its place, because they use the sea voyages as vehicles for meta- literary reflection, thus shifting the focus of the story from the surface action to the aesthetic and epistemological issues addressed in the subtext. It is precisely through quoting the faded tradition of seafaring tales once again that the novels question grand narratives such as the success story of exploring and colonizing the globe, together with hagiographic accounts thereof, whether fictional or not. This attitude is in keeping with what Jean-Francois Lyotard has called 'incredulity toward metanarratives.'23 The novels might not subscribe to conventional metanarratives, but they nevertheless assume (even require) the reader to be familiar with seafaring tales, and in inscribing themselves within this tradition, they not only undermine it but also revivify it. Postmodernism, typically concerning itself with textuality, self- referentiality, and self-reflexivity, overshadows the grand narrative with the grand metaphor.24

UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE BEATE MULLER

Arctic. The inhospitable North Pole is here contrasted favourably with the doomed Western civilization, a romanticized view of untarnished nature as a refuge, and a tacit acknowledgement that exploration leads to wisdom and foresight (at least in Payer, whose unpublished papers contain a note predicting the Russian Revolution, millions of casualties, the destruction of cities, and eventually that of the world): the outsider as ignored prophet, again, a conventional concept. 23 The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I984), p. xxiv. 24 An earlier version of this paper was given at the Conference of University Teachers of German (Leicester,

April 1998). I should like to thank Chris Bramall and Alan Menhennet for their comments on the written version.

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