In the preface to the account a split has already been produced in the European subject, who on the one hand inscribes his narrative in the ancient European myth of Hyperboreans inhabiting the outermost edge of the world and on the other builds on the indigenous knowledge about people who wear bearskins, feed on raw meat and live far off in the North, a realm unknown to West Greenlanders. The nexus of references stretches at the same time to the cradle of European civilisation with its grand narratives and to the Greenlandic oral tradition of telling stories of their ancestors by the light of fish-oil lamps when a storm is raging outside or the polar night has set in. Evoking both tale species simultaneously, the subject locates himself in-between the two stories, with the meaning of his own narrative similarly finely poised as “neither the one nor the other.”209
The journey to North Greenland is motivated by sentimental reasons that guide the European traveller. His innocence is highlighted by the fairy-tale nature of both tales: one heard from an old Greenlandic woman and the other produced by the narrator. Although he is already a grown-up male, he still resembles a young boy, who mirrors young Marlow in Heart of Darkness with his curiosity about the “blank spaces” on the map of the world and his urge to pursue his dreams of distant journeys and meetings with exotic, non-European Others in order to re-assert his own expectations and beliefs.210 Such journeying, ←70 | 71→which Syed Manzurul Islam labels “sedentary travel,”211 indeed institutes a rigid boundary between the Other and the knowing subject, immobilising the latter in its self-sufficiency.212 Such positioning leads to othering, a process based on essentialisation and the binary frame.213 The aims of Rasmussen’s traveller, which are presented as an innocent aspiration to capture otherness in the form of knowledge and patently unrelated to the goals of Eurocolonial expansion, inscribe the narrative about the original reason behind the expedition to the space inhabited by the mythical “new people” into the discursive paradigm of “anti-conquest.” This paradigm is expressed in a craving “for a way of taking possession without subjugation and violence,”214 where narrative is relied on for subordinating non-European subjects – despite or, rather, due to the obtrusive passivity and innocence of the western traveller.215 It results in a story entitled The New People, the foreword to which is the first of many inscriptions the narrator will perform upon the Inughuit people and the area of North Greenland.
The traveller’s yearning for the mythologised Other, however, expresses something more than just an aspiration of the remote and immobilised subject to give meaning to a non-European people in the guise of anti-conquest ideology. The subject’s utterance is split in itself, which comes to light when “the call of the other” surfaces in the narrator’s reflective retrospection.216 This call, which is first heard as an old Greenlandic woman is spinning her tale, becomes part of the narrator’s past experience and present moment, in which the Inughuit are still vivid in his mind, which is why he wants to meet them face to face. The discursivised presence of the Other makes the traveller mobile and directs him towards North Greenland. This shows that interaction is possible and, consequently, that it is possible to transcend “the paranoia of othering that represents the other in relation to oneself,” thus portending the viability of “nomadic travel,” during which the stiff boundary dividing the subject and the object will be demolished.217 Productive of his epistemological position, the journey of the foreword’s narrator to North Greenland may thus equally be an upshot of the ←71 | 72→shared past of the Other and the European subject and a project expressive of the passage of mutual experience from the past to the present.218
3 North Greenland and the Inughuit as the Other
North Greenland becomes a “new world” for Rasmussen’s narrator many years before he physically crosses the boundary between the parts of Greenland colonised by Denmark and the “no man’s land” in the north, where his narrative of the expedition commences. “We had reached our goal!”219 the European traveller announces triumphantly in the first sentence of his account, without explaining why he finds himself in this unknown area in the first place.
His joy is tarnished because one of his companions falls terminally ill and the natives, on meeting whom the success of the expedition hinges, are nowhere in sight. The travellers only come across recently abandoned “strange, primitive human dwellings”220 of the Inughuit, which makes them feel that they have come into contact with something unknown and new. The former dwellers apparently could not have gone far away because their tracks are only slightly covered in snow, and a big, yet-ungutted seal is found behind one of the snow huts. The narrator makes a poetic pause to reminisce about a legend an old Greenlander from the island’s western part once told him about a man who had lived north of all the settlements and who, like the travellers themselves now, had come across traces of strangers and freshly deserted dwellings several times, without ever seeing their inhabitants.
The inclusion of a Greenlandic legend into the story about the mysterious people of the North confirms the narrator’s familiarity with the oral folklore of Greenlanders, which had already been highlighted in the introduction to the account. This confirms the complexity of the narrative perspective, as the narrator is not just a Danish, middle-class male who is propelled by an innocent desire to meet “new people.” He is well versed in Greenlandic realities, which helps him interpret the traces left by “strangers” beyond that which the European framework of reference would allow. The dramatic nature of the situation which the travellers face is thus expressed through a parable whose course, if re-enacted, will be disastrous to the expedition members, dependent on the help of the absent natives as they all are.
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Having thoroughly scrutinised the abandoned abodes, the travellers grow even more distressed as the homes differ strikingly from everything the Europeans recognise as human dwelling places. Discursive processes of othering surface in the narrative:
The first time one sees a house of this description one is struck by the little with which human beings can be content. It is all so primitive, and has such an odour of paganism and magic incantation. A cave like this, skilfully built in arch of gigantic blocks of stone, one involuntarily peoples mentally with half supernatural beings. You see them, in your fancy, pulling and tearing at raw flesh, you see the blood dripping from their fingers, and you are seized yourself with a strange excitement at the thought of the extraordinary life that awaits you in their company.221
The “imagination was at work” both in the narrator and in the expedition members, and as it soared, so did the processes of making sense of the unknown reality.222 As perceived by the narrator, North Greenland turns into the space of “others,” and the otherness is marked by their heathen, uncivilised ways, mysterious aura and purported supernatural features. North Greenland is also “other” space as the narrator – who is a European traveller and a citizen of the country that took possession of a northern territory many times larger than itself, which it calls “Danish West Greenland”223 – refers to the Greenlandic hunters who accompany him as “our Greenlanders,”224 whereby he marks the difference between the familiar and the otherness he encounters, deflecting the imaginary constructs which emerge in his mind. A solid foundation is thus laid for the otherness of the Inughuit even before they appear as subjects within the superior European narrative.
The alterity of the “other” which is crafted in this way is, at the same time, moderated by the explanatory voice of the omniscient narrator. Describing the burial sites he comes across, he states: “There, then, men lay buried with all their possessions, as Eskimo custom prescribes,”225