Paper short abstract:

Christoph Ransmayrs novel "The terror of ice and darkness" (1984) depicts seasonality and environmental change through the narration about two polar voyages, a historic and a fictional one. Both illustrate scientific and socio-cultural elements of Arctic seasons in the 19.th and 20.th century.

Paper long abstract:

In Ransmayrs "The terror of ice and darkness", seasons are illustrated through the narration about the historic Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition from 1872-84. The leading polar researchers, Karl Weyprecht and Julius Payer, were attempting to establish a new route connecting the North Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, but their ship became trapped in the closing sea ice. During three years, the mariners experience the seasonal changes between melting ice in all day sunlit summers and growing ice sheets in cold and dark winters.

So on the one hand seasonality is explicitly narrated through a scientific lens, also by looking at concepts of deep time and geological transformations of the earth. On the other hand the novel addresses seasonality in a socio-cultural sense, too. In a retrospective manner, it demonstrates the collective effort of humanity to pass the arctic ice sea since the beginning of the north pole exploration. Next to the real Payer-Weyprecht-expedition, Ransmayr creates a fictional descendant from one of the seamen, the writer Joseph Mazzini. He travels on a steamship, crossing the Arctic sea for scientific reasons, to Spitzbergen, but in the end, he suddenly vanishes in the endless desert of the North Pole. With this genealogical brake, the novel contributes to questions about disruptions of timescales and at the same time provides a self-reflective access to literature. When the novel was published, the concept of the so called ‘Anthropocene’ was not inaugurated yet, but the story exposes various examples of an anthropogenic impact on the Arctic landscape.