I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination

by Francis Spufford

Book Overview

Francis Spufford explores the British obsession with polar exploration in a book that Jan Morris, writing in The Times, called, "A truly majestic work of scholarship, thought and literary imagination . . ." The title, a last quote from one explorer to his party as he left their tent never to return, embodies the danger and mystery that fueled the romantic allure of the poles and, subsequently, the British imagination. Far from being a conventional...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312220812
• ISBN13: 9780312220815
• Release Date: July 1999
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Length: 388 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A Well Argued Thesis, but One that Must be Critically Evaluated

Francis Spufford's "I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination" seeks to show the relationship between polar exploration and English literature. He asks why British polar explorers willingly placed their lives in jeopardy in the harsh polar environment; was it gold or glory or something else? The answer, Spufford believes, rests not with the explorers themselves but with the English imagination as expressed in the writings of such the Brontës, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, and others. At a sublime level this book is about the power of ideas to shape imperial ambitions. Romance about the Arctic distorted perceptions both of reality in England and in the far-off lands of the North. The concept of the sublime in the works of Edmund Burke and Samuel Coleridge found themselves deployed to explain the inspiration and terror of the Arctic ice and the environment of the cold. Arctic explorers transmogrified the sublime into a nostalgic identification of the Poles with the best of the human imagination. Conquest of the Arctic in Spufford's estimation might be equated with virtue and destiny. It propelled the British Empire into an unending quest for knowledge about the Polar region. Spufford's argument is quite useful, but it tends to downplay what I view as the critical component of English exploration of the Arctic, the quite mundane and practical desire to find a water route around the Americas to foster trade with Asia. The search for the Northwest Passage had motivated English Arctic expeditions since the sixteenth century and while imagination certainly aided in sustaining those efforts in the face of failure, there was a clearly understood and delineated rationale for undertaking them that had little to do with the sublime and philosophies. A fascinating account nonetheless, that requires serious consideration by anyone seriously interested in the history of Arctic exploration.

I began to think then that things were getting a bit serious

If you have come this far into the Antarctic you've already read Lansing, Mawson, Scott, Shack, Cherry-Garrard, and Lashly. So those trudging first person narratives that caught your attention have given over to the Huntford style management critic, you got that. And here with Spufford you arrive at the analytical pole. This is not a discussion of technique nor tactics but from the South Center you can look in all directions at religion, music, poetry, myth, media; and the very power of precedence to both push and pull men. Here is the geography that makes otherwise hard practical men simply and ultimately spiritual; the deserts frozen or not, hold horizons of nothing that fill mens' heads with everything. Beyond this is to dream and hallucinate; try a little Vollmann. Enjoy the ride. PS. The last chapter of this book is worth its price; 48 pages of the best in the language on Scott and his men. It will make you cry.

Psychohistory of a famous disaster

Fascinating exploration of how the romantic movement nurtured the creation of an ideal vision of arctic/antarctic ice that ultimately contributed to a sense that it was nobler to suffer than survive. I found the book a well-written survey of popular opinion and response to polar exploration in England that presents an interesting thought: the idea that the ultimate source of Scott's disaster in the Antarctic may not have been stupidity, ego, arrogance, or any of the character flaws with which Robert F. Scott has been charged so much as hopeless romanticism (a character flaw all its own, true enough, which may contain elements of All Of The Above).