Chapitre I. Sources primaires et récriture postmoderne

A challenging read, Vollmann’s novel destabilizes the reader to offer a complex historical perspective which questions both today’s situation and the historical impact of nineteenth-century journeys of exploration. To begin with, Vollmann’s Rifles presents the North as a troubled ecosystem, highlighting cultural degradation and common addictions, as well as the impact of the “relocation policy” » of the fifties, and the Inuits’ current inability to make their voice heard and obtain compensation. A playful pastiche of Moby-Dick, the novel’s eponymous central chapter points to the dissemination of rifles as the main cause for decay.However, The Rifles is a novel of ecocriticism with a twist. The text plays with multiple sources, quotingand distorting, shifting compulsively back and forth in time, to demystify the heroic legend of Franklin’s expeditions. Vollmann maps the trips with accuracy, drawing inspiration from Victorian engravings and from Franklin’s early accounts, such as Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819-1822, but also tapping into recent discoveries and Beattie’s emphasis on lead poisoning, imagining the consequences of lead slowly seeping into minds and bodies. Thus Vollmann creates a pastiche of nineteenth-century narratives of exploration, complete with mock illustrations, maps and lists of names. But he also adds sarcastic counterpoints, from sudden blatant anachronistic shifts to incongruous juxtapositions and subtle shifts which cast an ironic light on the quotations from historical journals. Barthes’ concept of “myth” and Bourdieu’s analysis of the semiotic system of domination highlight Vollmann’s deconstruction of British icons. Thus Vollmann’s ironic historiographic metafiction plays on metamorphosis, rather than the slavish imitation of sources. Just as in the opening chapter the source of water cannot be located on the island, since the permafrost thaws temporarily on the surface to create multiple streams, Vollmann refuses to mimic sources but combines and distorts them, creating a kaleidoscopic text which mirrors the jigsaw puzzle of ice, aiming to make the reader share the sensation of disorientation and dislocation which is experienced both by the nineteenth-century crew and the twentieth century protagonist, Subzero, Vollmann’s alter ego.Vollmann’s Rifles tropes on the Gothic to expose gendered official historical discourse. Interestingly enough, Subzero is also presented as the nineteenth-century “twin” of the nineteenth-century emblematic Arctic explorer, Sir John Franklin. The Gothic motif also works in reverse: if Subzero is obsessed with Franklin, Franklin is equally haunted by Subzero’s life and loves. In Vollmann’s version, the stern, pious and eminent Victorian yearns for his twentieth-century Inuk mistress, Reepah. Thus the novel dramatizes the return of the repressed, since the text displays Hood’s affair with Greenstockings, an Indian woman, and Back's jealousy, a historical fact that was duly erased from Franklin’s journals, which never hint at the officers’misbehaviour. Franklin’s affair with Reepah blurs temporal boundaries to reveal the fantasmatic nature of Arctic exploration itself, turning the Arctic into virgin female space which must be conquered. Exposing the gendered nature of exploration, Vollmann displays the symbolic violence unleashed by white intrusion, and the unfathomable chain of causes and consequences. As opposed to white constructs, the myth of Sedna is used as a potent motif associated with Reepah (in the hairdresser’s episode for instance), to point to the traditional sense of a precarious balance between men and animals, to the prevailing death-drive, and failure of regeneration.In true Gothic fashion, Vollmann’s tale also endows place with a haunting dimension. The abandoned weather station where Subzero ventures alone on Ellef Ringnes Island turns into a trap, a shadowy space full of spectral sounds, where the iron collars of ice submit the weary body to a painful ordeal, exposing yet again the hubris of technology. For the nineteenth-century crew, the ice becomes the ultimate version of the Gothic maze, bringing no way out but perilous wandering through shifting floes, then lethal paralysis. Unexpectedly, Vollmann discards sensationalism and tackles cannibalism as the metonymy for Imperial appetite and blind confidence. Thus Vollmann’s text rewrites the great tradition of the nineteenth-century, blending it with a dire depiction of the impoverishment of the Inuit way of life, using shock tactics such as anachronistic shifts to call for readers’ response and awaken an anguish-stricken awareness of irreversibility.

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