This project both is and isn’t a straight retelling of Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-1917.
Members of the Expedition, Frank Hurley, 1914-1917
Being a true story, this is a problem.
Every movie, and almost every book and chronicle, of the adventure has left out significant events in order to construct a believable narrative. In part, this is due to time compression. The several hours of a film, or the several weeks of a book, only have so much room, before the viewer or reader begins to suffer from that plague of the picaresque, novelty fatigue. Once novelty fatigue sets in, the adventure ceases to impress, or to cohere. There are simply “too many notes.”
A number of day-jobs ago, I worked for the director of a museum of natural history, whose hobby it was to collect books on polar exploration. Occasionally I would be asked to track down one of these books, and one day I asked, “What kind of a hobby is that, anyway? What’s so great about polar exploration?” In answer, I received a raised eyebrow.
But several days later, I came in to a book left on my chair. It was Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing (1959), an account of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17. I felt obligated to actually read the thing, so I took it home and took it up — and didn’t put it down until I finished. The adventure it told was so incredible, so action-packed, so unbelievable in fact, that I could not stop reading until I made it to the very end. Lansing had been able to interview many of the survivors and had combed through detailed diaries of others (the diaries Shackleton had insisted they all keep during their long ordeal).
After that I was hooked. Not on polar exploration itself, or general stories thereof, but on Shackleton’s amazing adventure, his failure and his triumph.
The Endurance, trapped, as dogs look on, Frank Hurley, 1914-1917
Reasonable trim looks very different for Twitter narratives. Telling the story in tweets takes at most few minutes a day, for a number of months. Any fallen disbelief can be restrung in the hours in-between. And although each tweet is short, they accumulate, and in accumulation can combine to form complex characters — or almost unbelievable adventures.
While the Twitter adventure will blog Shackleton’s entire journey, it will not be only in his words. This is an historical fiction: I will quote him, but more often I will be imagining him, inventing internal dialogue to explore the explorer. In addition, the narrative will also be sampling observations from other explorers of the extremes, such as Werner Herzog and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and mixing in other contemporary materials and commentary.
By mapping the negative spaces of extremity, these and other depth explorers have all attempted to limn what it means to be human, by seeing how far we can — or should — go. Shackleton seeks to explore the lengths to which we will go to find meaning, wonder, or the fabled far edges of the earth.
This blog is a companion to the Twitter feed, and will host supplementary material along the way. But the real action is on Twitter. Join the expedition by following @EShackleton.
