Re: Polar Fictions
 

Mads, do you have a copy Faunus no. 9? It contains an article Machen wrote for children about Scott's expedition. I'm not sure if its of any relevance but I thought I'd mention it anyway given the weird fiction connection.

There's also the Jean Ray story; The Formidable Secret of the Pole

I've never looked at it that way. If your going along those lines wouldn't you have divorce the events of the novel from the larger narrative frame work? I always seen The Purple Cloud as Sheil's attempt to combine certain aspects of Social Darwinism and Neitzschian philosophy with an Old Testament Good VS Evil dichotomy.

Re: Polar Fictions
 

Three possibly relevant sf novels which I haven't read:
Antarctica, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Circumpolar! by Richard A. Lupoff
The Hollow Earth, by Rudy Rucker

In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute gives the following intriguing description of Rucker's novel: ". . . an orthodox alternate-world tale set in the 19th century, in which an inner world (Hollow Earth) can be entered from the South Pole, which is what Edgar Allan Poe and the young protagonist do. The treatment of Poe is remarkable for its relative lack of gaucheness."

(Brief pause to register my appreciation of the last sentence above. Clute's encyclopedia entries and book reviews are always fun to read.)

Also possibly relevant, Glenn Gould did three radio documentaries about people who live in remote northern locations. The series, which I haven't heard, is called The Solitude Trilogy: The Idea of North, The Latecomers, and The Quiet in the Land.

Re: Polar Fictions
 

There's Barbara Roden's "Northwest Passage" that is about the arctic and it's exploration. I suppose that's obvious from the title...

Re: Polar Fictions
 

I highly recommend Christoph Ransmayr's first novel:

His other works are also interesting (though not necessarily for your project) and some of them should appeal to members of TLO. His debut "Strahlender Untergang" (which as far as I know hasn't been translated into English) talks (to quote the blurb) "with grim irony of the downfall of the lord of the earth, the disappearance of man in the desert".

Re: Polar Fictions
 

There is also this book

Re: Polar Fictions
 

Re: Machen - I don't own that specific number. I bought some other numbers, but I think this one was unavailable when I bought the other ones (for a thesis on regression into slime, and atavism, and Darwinist motives in Machen's early works (it got a "12", the Danish equivalent of an A, much to my surprise as I thought it a complete failure)).

Regarding The Purple Cloud, it is not only the framing which casts the fiction as unstable, unreliable. Jeffson is not only an unreliable narrator, but also, and more importantly, and unreliable interpreter of events.

Jeffson is not wholly rational: he takes dream visions seriously; his understanding of the world is based on two inner voices which battle within him (one "white"/good, one "black"/bad) - this white/black dichotomy is not of his invention, but something he has adopted from a fellow student at Cambridge, and thus, his whole frame of understanding is irrational at best. He is a man of science, too, a doctor.

At the end, Jeffson thinks that he has glimpsed the true nature of the world, and the meaning of the disaster. But: his interpretation has been varying widely throughout the novel before that. This could be a sign of rationality - that he is willing to shed his understanding of a former hypothesis in view of new facts, but it could also be construed as to suggest a lack of ability to interpret events correctly, and as a highly evolved ability to construct an incosistent understanding of events.

The correlation between the dates of the eruption of the purple cloud and the day of Jeffson reaching the pole is there, but we don't know if there is any causality - it could just as well be a coincidence, as could Jeffsons survival of the cloud. After all, there does not seem to be any moral justification for Jeffson surviving, since he is almost wholly amoral. This could of course be because of Shiel's views on morality.

On the pole, Jeffson's vision cannot be wholly verified by himself: "think", "felt", "fathomed", "impression", "dream", "fantasy" topped with a "this must be my madness" is how he describes his vision. Once again, this could be interpreted as his rationality not wanting to give in to a vision, that is in fact real, or as a fit of polar madness.

Also, his linking of Mackay's prophecies with the end is debatable - why should this particular doomsayer be more right than every other doomsayer who has ever existed?

His megalomania and pyromania accounts for some sort of mental disorder as well.

When in Constantinople, a voice orders him to "kill and eat" Leda, but is struck to the ground by lightning - he interprets this as White's reaction to his impulse, but a few pages earlier he has noted that storms are more frequent and wilder than before. Also his memory is flawed (he admits so himself) and he doesn't consult earlier notebooks.

Generally, we tend to trust the last version given, when presented with contradictory accounts of events. Here, we cannot necessarily trust the last, since there are many, many more occasions where Jeffsons narration and interpretation may very likely be flawed. I won't list them all, but they are indeed there, also in his relations to Leda and in her interpretation of the world (which are derived from Jeffson); this post have become relatively long and I need to get back to work.

However, this possibility of an interpretation vastly differing from Jeffson's own, is what, apart from the purple prose passages and the general fascination of the plot, makes the novel so brilliant: it can sustain two wholly opposing interpretations, where the ideas of extreme contingency and teodicy are never resolved (for the reader).

Re: Polar Fictions
 

If I remember right the story Northwest Passage is set in the Canadian forest. But the collection it features in (Northwest Passages) contains two polar stories (Endless Night and The Brink Of Eternity).