5 Cory Willard

Glaciers, Embodiment, and the Sublime
An Ecocritical Approach to Thomas Wharton’s Icefields

Icefields, by Thomas Wharton, is a fictionalized account of the early exploration and subsequent development of Jasper National Park, in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. Established in 1907, the park lies to the north of the older Banff National Park and is famed for its glaciers, which are fed by the massive Columbia Icefield. Wharton’s novel is imbued with a strong sense of history, not only recognizing the presence of Indigenous peoples in the area long before the arrival of Europeans but also reaching into deep time, through the fascination of its central character, Doctor Edward Byrne, with glaciology. Against the backdrop of the Jasper landscape, Wharton explores the commodification of the natural world as he charts Byrne’s journey into the embodied experience of place. Through this experience, Byrne gradually develops an understanding of the interrelationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world and of the connection between ecological and spiritual awareness.

In addition to glaciers, Jasper is the site of spectacular mountains that have long attracted mountaineers, and climbing expeditions play a significant role in the action of Wharton’s novel. Like many other arduous physical activities, mountaineering can be taken up either as pure sport or in connection with some other objective, such as exploration or scientific inquiry. Either way, however, mountaineering requires a level of embodiment, physical mastery, and environmental awareness that unifies the practitioner with the field of play. Like the boxer who instinctively knows where the corners of the ring are, or the tennis player who knows her stride on grass or clay or carpet and how these surfaces alter the ball’s behaviour, or the skier who effortlessly adapts to the snow pack, the mountain’s topography, and fluctuations in weather conditions, the mountain climber develops an embodied connection to the physical environment. In “Why Climbing Matters,” an ecocritical exploration of mountaineering literature, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy writes that “climbing sensitizes the body, opens it to the land’s current, and thereby animates it to awareness of the natural world” (2008, 171).

McCarthy argues that the embodied experience of mountain climbing can help us move toward “a new way of knowing nature,” one that is urgently needed at a time when “a chorus of environmental voices insists that transforming human attitudes toward nature is the only solution to our ongoing ‘environmental crisis’” (2008, 159–60). As he points out, in writing about their experience of climbing, “mountaineers offer a vision of human relations to nature,” as well as insight into “how these relations might transcend their cultural context” (2008, 158), both of which hold the potential to heighten environmental and ecological awareness. From a phenomenological perspective, climbing can produce a sense of oneness with nature, a visceral understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of the human body and the surrounding environment. In addition, narratives about climbing often convey messages about ecological responsibility, expressing “sympathy for a natural world of glaciers and streams and rock faces that merit protection from overuse by industrial culture” (162). As we will see, such themes occupy a prominent place in Wharton’s novel.

Icefields opens in August 1898, with Byrne, a doctor from Britain, taking part in a scientific expedition, led by a professor named Collie, in the Canadian Rockies near Jasper. As the party travels across the “Arcturus” glacier, Byrne slips on the ice and falls into a crevasse. This accident, in which Byrne breaks his collarbone, shapes the rest of his life. Trapped in the crevasse, Byrne sees what appears to be an angel embedded in the ice and develops a passionate interest in glaciers, subsequently returning to the place of his accident for study. His injury leaves him unable to climb to the upper reaches of the glacier, effectively limiting his observations to its lower reaches and terminus. This spatial limitation forces an increase in the depth of Byrne’s observations, allowing him to perceive subtle changes in the ice. Juxtaposed to this narrowing of physical space is an extension of time. Over the course of his many visits to the Jasper area, Byrne develops a deep attachment to the place, while he also comes to understand the impact of human activity on ecological relationships.

In Icefields, the Canadian Rockies are revealed, through the characters’ varied relationships to the landscape, as fostering a particularly strong sense of place—so much so that the Arcturus glacier itself becomes a central character in the narrative. Sense of place, as explored by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, refers to all the distinctive aspects of a specific location that offer human beings a reason to develop an attachment to it. As Tuan notes in his landmark work Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, “Place is a special kind of object. It is a concretion of value, though not a valued thing that can be handled or carried about easily; it is an object in which one can dwell” (1977, 12). For Tuan and those influenced by his work, a place isn’t merely a point in physical space, as we so often conceive of it; rather, “space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning” (136). Place thus comprises the many layers of sometimes competing meanings that people give to a particular space. Place is, as Tim Cresswell puts it, “a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world. When we look at the world as a world of places we see different things. We see attachments and connections between people and place” (2004, 11). In Icefields, this variation in meaning and attachment is most clearly illustrated in the differing significance of the glacier for Byrne and for Frank Trask, the expedition guide and indefatigable entrepreneur. Whereas Trask sees the area as something to be exploited for financial gain, for Byrne, the glacier is a source of knowledge about the world and about life itself.

Through Byrne’s interests and observations, we gain a sense of the cultural, geological, and historical evolution of the Rocky Mountains. In addition, through his growing environmental consciousness, we are obliged to confront the sometimes troubling relationship between people and places. Cresswell suggests that adopting a place-based perspective can at times “seem to be an act of resistance against a rationalization of the world. . . . To think of an area of the world as a rich and complicated interplay of people and the environment—as a place—is to free us from thinking of it as facts and figures” (2004, 11). This sense of place, as a site of interaction, lies at the heart of the narrative in Icefields. With each encounter, Arcturus glacier and the nearby town of Jasper are taken further and further from the realm of inert matter as they are invested with meaning—as what appears to be an endless, empty open space, a frozen wilderness, is transformed into a place of diverse and sometimes conflicting meanings.

ECOCRITICISM: CONFRONTING THE FRAGILITY OF PLACE

Topics such as the relationship of human beings to the natural environment, threats to the sustainability of ecological systems, the commodification of nature, and the weakening of a sense of place are of particular interest to those who view literature through the theoretical lens known as ecocriticism, an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and the environment. Before we delve into Wharton’s novel itself, a brief overview of ecocriticism thus seems in order. As Lawrence Buell, one of the most prominent scholars of literature and the environment, explains, literary analysts who employ an ecocritical approach attempt to speak “in cognizance of human being as ecologically or environmentally embedded” (2005, 8). While this embeddedness might seem obvious, only in the latter half of the twentieth century did literary scholars begin to give serious and sustained attention to the relationship between people and the natural environment. Buell suggests that ecocritical scholarship developed in response to “a growing malaise about modern industrial society’s inability to manage its unintended environmental consequences” (5), consequences that have grown ever more apparent over the past several decades.

In adopting an ecological perspective on literature, ecocriticism is marked by an openness to interdisciplinary scholarship. The work of literary scholars who bring an environmental lens to bear on texts is enriched by the research of scholars in fields such as the natural sciences, geography, history, anthropology, sociology, and so on. As Buell notes:

Literature scholars who took the environmental turn in the 1980s and 1990s found themselves entering a mind-expanding though also vertiginous array of cross-disciplinary conversations—with life scientists, climatologists, public policy specialists, geographers, cultural anthropologists, landscape architects, environmental lawyers, even applied mathematicians and environmental engineers. (2005, 5–6)

Buell argues that this “environmental turn” was in part a reaction against the so-called linguistic turn in literary criticism, according to which a text constitutes a self-contained and ultimately self-referential whole, an approach that separates “reader from text and text from world” (6). By insisting that texts cannot be adequately understood purely by analyzing their internal structure, without any reference to the surrounding world, ecocritics seek to return both readers and texts to the realm of embodied experience in relation to the ecological world.

As Buell points out, although a work of literature can be viewed as a kind of ecosystem in itself, “in the narrow sense of the text as a discursive ‘environment,’” both readers and texts are inseparably intertwined with the world around them. For that reason, “an individual text must be thought of as environmentally embedded at every stage from its germination to its reception” (2005, 44). A narrative cannot be divorced from its social, cultural, and historical setting, and, given that all stories occur somewhere, narratives are inevitably also expressions of place. One may choose to ignore the physical setting of a novel, play, or film in order to focus on some other aspect of the narrative, but because all texts are environmentally embedded, virtually any text can be explored from an ecocritical point of view.

In view of this multidimensional embeddedness, the ecocritic is concerned not only with people and their place in the natural environment but also with the social relations that produce texts, meanings, and critical awareness. In order to write about nature in a way that could itself be considered ecocritical, an author must not only be ecologically mindful but also socially and politically conscious—for the ultimate goal of writing is often to influence the world, as opposed to simply describing it. In addition to ongoing threats to ecosystem integrity, as a society we are witnessing a gradual loss of sense of place. As Buell puts it, “at a time when fewer and fewer of the world’s population live out their lives in locations that are not shaped to a great extent by translocal—ultimately global—forces,” one must ask whether “‘place’ as traditionally understood means anything anymore” (2005, 62–63). Indeed, he writes, “one cannot theorize scrupulously about place without confronting its fragility” (62). Now more than ever, it seems essential to focus our attention on the myriad of ecological relationships that exist among texts, people, and the environment as a whole.

EMBODIED EXPERIENCE IN ICEFIELDS

One of the central themes of Icefields is the importance of embodied experience. Wharton’s novel is replete with sensory descriptions of human encounters with ice, wind, and the wild mountainous environment. In The Spell of the Sensuous, cultural ecologist David Abram argues that “humans are tuned for relationship”: “The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness” (1996, ix). As he goes on to note, “For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon” (ix). For Abram, the reality that we experience through our senses—that subjective experience so often ignored by objective science—is in fact the means by which we both understand and embed ourselves within the greater ecology of the natural world. We may be able to analyze the mechanics of a homerun swing, but that does not capture the experience itself—the physical sensation of swinging a bat, the knowledge we gain through that action, and the meanings we attach to it.

Abram writes that “the perceiving body does not calculate logical probabilities; it gregariously participates in the activity of the world, lending its imaginations to things in order to see them more fully” (1996, 58). In Icefields, it is often this direct sensory perception, this immediacy of connection, that provides the novel’s characters with insight into the world around them. Byrne’s fall into the depths of the glacier does not introduce themes of adventure and bravery in the face of danger; our attention is focused instead on what comes to Byrne through his senses. Trapped in the crevasse, he sees something he cannot explain:

He squinted. There was something in the ice, a shape, its outline sharpening as the light grew. A fused mass of trapped air bubbles, or a vein of snow, had formed a chance design, a white form embedded within the darker ice and revealed by the light of the sun. A pale human figure, with wings. The white figure lay on its side, the head turned away from him. Its huge wings were spread wide, one of them cracked obliquely near the tip, the broken pinions slightly detached. One arm was also visible, outstretched, in the semblance of some gesture that Byrne felt he had seen before, but could not interpret. A remembered sculpture or one of Blake’s hovering, pitying spirits. The shape gleamed wetly, like fine porcelain or delicately veined marble. (Wharton 1995, 11)

Byrne sees the image of an angel trapped in the ice—something that simply cannot or should not be.

Initially, Byrne attempts to find a rational, scientific explanation for the phenomenon (“air bubbles, or a vein of snow”), musing on his vision as “a wonder to report to Collie. A hitherto unknown periscopic property of glacial ice” (Wharton 1995, 11). However, as his thoughts progress to Romantic poet and artist William Blake, and as the narrative unfolds and Byrne’s obsession with solving the mystery grows, we see how direct sensory experience does more than merely foster scientific curiosity: it becomes a new way of knowing, an alteration of his world view. Byrne tells the “scandalous lady alpinist” and travel writer Freya Becker, “I’ve learned a lot from the glacier itself. A way of looking at the rest of the world. Patience. Control of the emotions” (109, 189). In observing the motion of the glacier over two and a half decades, Byrne does not just see a series of objective scientific laws playing out but comes to understand a way of being in the world. He learns an appreciation for nature and natural processes, as is evident in his conflicts with Trask’s entrepreneurial operations, and he learns the patience and sense of balance that comes from ecological mindfulness.

Reflecting on the lessons to be gleaned from mountain climbing, McCarthy writes that “the corporeal, bodily fact of climbing points us toward the possibility of a sustainable relation between human beings and the natural world” (2008, 158). Climbing can, he argues, remind us that “humans and nature intermingle, overlap, connect,” as opposed to existing “side by side as active subject and passive object” (170). Although, in Icefields, Byrne’s injury limits his ability to climb, it is he whose outlook is most fundamentally altered by his initial experience of climbing and who ultimately finds the most intimate relationship with the natural world. This relationship, which begins from his embodied experience in the crevasse, is sustained by his ongoing scientific observations—themselves grounded in direct sensory perception. Byrne studies the ice and comes to know it deeply: as an active subject, he engages in what might seem the passive act of observing, while the apparently inert mass of ice becomes a living thing, with its own direction and movements. Whereas Trask regards the landscape as an object that human action can manipulate for purposes of financial gain, Byrne gains something arguably more precious and more permanent: a felt, embodied knowledge of human interconnectivity with the environment.

EXPERIENCING THE SUBLIME: ECOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Wharton has said that, in Icefields, he wanted to write about Jasper in a way that “would avoid clichés of writing about the mountains and would if possible somehow be close to that wordless experience of a place” (Wyile 2002, 168). That “wordless” experience is wonder, the sense of standing in the presence of the sublime. In nineteenth-century Romanticism, the term sublime came, as a noun, to describe “either a landscape that stimulates spiritual awareness or the literary work or painting that captures this elevated quality” (Gaull 1988, 232). The sublime was associated, in particular, with nature at its most powerful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring—“the volcanoes, the earthquakes, the storms, the mountains, caves, and oceans, reminders of God’s power and wrath” (232). An embodied connection to the natural world often gives rise to a sense of the sublime, and, as the novel suggests, the desire or capacity of an individual to receive the wonder that nature can evoke lies at the foundation of both ecological awareness and a spirituality rooted in nature.

The relationship between the nature and spiritual experience is established at the very outset of Icefields, not only by Byrne’s vision of the angel in the ice but also by a reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” one of the iconic poems of the Romantic period. As Byrne is recovering from this accident, Sara, the woman who tends to him, reads the poem aloud to Byrne, and Wharton quotes its famous opening lines:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

     Down to a sunless sea. (Wharton 1995, 32)

Later in the novel, Byrne recalls “a fact he had always known and yet ignored”: “Glaciers are rivers. Water” (169). We understand the Arcturus glacier to be the site of some sort of sacred power, and it is, of course, Byrne’s own experience in “caverns measureless to man” that initiates his quest for understanding.

That this quest is a spiritual one is also established early in the novel, by its association with the quest for the Holy Grail. As Byrne is convalescing, Sara tells him about Lord Sexsmith, an English aristocrat and adventurer, who, a generation earlier, set out on a hunting expedition in the area around Jasper. In the course of his journey, Sexsmith dreamt of “an old man in rusted armour,” who is carrying “his sacred trust, an object shrouded under a white cloth, across the plain and into the blue mountains” (Wharton 1995, 40). Françoise Besson draws a connection between Byrne and Sexsmith’s dream:

The symbolism of the Grail suggests the mystical quality of Sexsmith’s expedition and the “rusted armour” the man wears recalls the image of a knight of the Round Table. Later on, Freya Becker, . . . describing Byrne, says: “he’s forged himself an impressive suit of armour” (192). Freya’s metaphor echoes Sexsmith’s dream and the reader may suppose that, like Sexsmith, and like the old man carrying the Grail, Byrne is a modern knight pursuing his own Grail. Byrne, who had a religious vision of things at one moment in his life—at one point he had even thought of being a priest—is metaphorically and symbolically associated with the old man in the dream. (215–16)

As Besson further notes, the mythical Grail was said to have been carved from an enormous emerald, and “the colour green recurs in the novel like a sign,” becoming, she argues, “the symbolical colour of a hidden truth” (2011, 215).

Sexsmith and his party travel deeper into the mountains, moving toward a snow-covered peak that, seen from a distance, appears to Sexsmith as “an Asiatic temple floating in the air.” Up close, however, the mountain becomes “a massive presence” (28), and the weary Sexsmith is awed. He “closed his eyes, overcome by sudden vertigo. Here was the edge of the earth, and far below it clouds drifted over an empty blue ocean. [. . .] He was thirty-one years old. A Victorian in the presence of the sublime” (1995, 28–29). The party travels on, climbing up a ridge beside “a gently rising slope of dirty snow and ice. Arcturus glacier, Sexsmith named it” (43). Inspired by his dream, Sexsmith is determined to go further, toward a mysterious source of light—a “spirit place,” he is told (43). He ventures out onto the ice of the glacier, but what he experiences there remains unknown to us. He returns in a “black mood” (45), and the party turns around, the expedition at an end.

The parallel between Sexsmith’s adventure, which culminates in his mysterious experience atop the glacier, and Byrne’s vision of the angel in the crevasse is, of course, unmistakable. Toward the end of the novel, Byrne speculates about why Sexsmith turned back and why, in his memoirs, he mentioned only his disappointment.

But was that all? Byrne wonders. Why would he keep silent about it? Unless, like me, he encountered something that he dared not set down in his memoirs.

Disappointment. Nothing but snow, ice, cloud, wind. That was all he found. And what he could not accept. A world with a wasteland like this at its summit. (181)

In many ways, Sexsmith’s response to the glacier typifies that of European explorers to the wilderness: it is terra nullius, empty space, yet to tamed. He is trapped in what Smaro Kamboureli describes as “the imperial zeitgeist of discovery and exploration, the desire to conquer and name the unknown” (2011, 204). Sexsmith also assumes that he knows what “the sublime” should look like and hence will be able to recognize when he is in its presence. Yet his capacity to respond to the glacier is preempted by his expectations—his desire to arrive at some forbidden “spirit place” and to find something he will likewise recognize as a Holy Grail. Caught up in his fantasies, Sexsmith is unable to appreciate what is present before him and so retreats from an experience that Byrne instead explores.

Much the same can be said of Trask, who eventually has his own encounter with the angel in the ice. If Sexsmith stands as a symbol of European exploration, then the deeply pragmatic Trask represents subsequent exploitation: throughout the narrative, he is intent on the transformation of natural beauty into a tourist attraction. Toward the close of the novel, amidst the construction of a roadway into the base of the glacier, Trask decides to climb out onto the ice, admitting to Byrne that he has not “set foot on the glacier” (255) since the expedition some twenty-five years earlier. After parting company with Byrne, Trask heads off on his own, “skirting a small crevasse” (258)—which we infer is the crevasse into which Byrne once fell, now diminished in size—but takes a wrong turn and has to work his way back home by a circuitous route. At one point, he rests briefly at the base of an “upthrust pinnacle of dirty ice”: “The pinnacle, sculpted by water and ice, rises in a graceful curve over his head. He nestles for a moment within its scant shelter. Just like a folded wing” (259). The ice is melting, and not long afterward, the shelf of ice on which Trask had paused collapses into the meltwater. Thinking back on his experience later that day, Trask muses that there “must be an artist in the construction crew,” an “undiscovered Michelangelo” (260):

Trask shakes his head. The wasted effort. Didn't the fellow realize how short-lived his creation would be? He probably did. That's why the thing had been unfinished, looking as if it was just emerging from the ice.

Better stick to building roads and bridges. (261)

Trask is presented as almost wholly bereft of both ecological and spiritual consciousness. Nature is, for him, a resource, rather than a source of understanding.

Wharton once commented in an interview, “I think the story of Byrne at some point deliberately became a story that was meant to show a development of an environmental consciousness. . . . I think over the course of the novel he moves towards what we see today as an environmental, ecologically oriented attitude” (Wyile 2002, 174). If we are to understand Byrne as having an environmental awakening, then the tension that the novel establishes between the conventional exploration and development of nature and nature as the site of a holy quest suggests that ecological awakening also entails an awakening of the spirit.

Fundamental to both religious or spiritual experience is the capacity to feel awe—to marvel at that which is beyond our understanding. In the popular imagination, a religious or spiritual response to the world is often opposed to a rational, scientific one. As Allan Hepburn puts it in an essay on Wharton’s novel, “Because science often discounts the inventions of a storyteller, the wonderful, by default, includes the antiscientific” (2001, 76). Yet, as he goes on to point out, “Scientific Byrne, more than any other character in Icefields, feels wonder without relinquishing his rationality. Science and wonder are not incompatible; they just offer utterly different approaches to nature. The wondrous is a holdout of what science has not explained, measured, and complicated” (76). Science is, in fact, ultimately founded on the experience of wonder and a confrontation with mystery that prompts a search for explanations.

Hepburn argues that “Icefields posits an original wonder that can be glimpsed in and through touristic models of looking at landscape. Tourism doesn’t nullify wonder; it merely makes it more difficult to see” (2001, 72). Similarly, a relentless search for rational explanations can easily cause us to lose sight of our original experience of wonder, while it may also tempt us to ignore or dismiss whatever resists explanation and insists instead on remaining a mystery. As Abram observes, there are always those who

simply will not see any magic, either at a performance or in the world at large; armored with countless explanations and analyses, they “see” only how the trick must have been accomplished. . . . Encouraged by a cultural discourse that disdains the unpredictable and puts a premium on detached objectivity, such persons attempt to halt the participation of their senses in the phenomenon. Yet they can do so only by imaginatively projecting other phenomena . . . or by looking away. (1996, 59)

Byrne refuses to look away; his brush with wonder inspires his obsession with glaciology, but, in his quest for an answer to the mystery, he never loses track of his original encounter with the inexplicable.

Trask, in contrast, is more inclined to explain away what he cannot fathom. Thinking back to his own adventure on the ice, he experiences a brief glimmer of wonder, as he recalls the pinnacle of ice crashing into the water: “But ice floats, he thought at the time. Where did it go? The rock and mud clinging to the pinnacle must have weighted it down” (260). His thoughts go no further, however. Consumed by visions of tourist development, he must ignore or repress wonder in order to maintain his resource-focused world view. He looks away, much like Sexsmith, who, trapped in his expectations, cannot recognize the sublime when he is standing on top of it. He gazes outward and sees only emptiness, a space devoid of meaning.

MULTIPLE VALUES: THE TRANSFORMATION OF PLACE

In Kamboureli’s analysis, “Icefields explores the structure of colonialism by iterating history,” a history “supplemented by a narrative of progress that involves the construction of the Grand Trunk and the building of chalets” (2011, 204). Although the novel is set primarily in the early twentieth century, Wharton provides glimpses of earlier moments in Jasper’s history, revealing the contrasting meanings that the area has held for various groups of people. Sara, the woman who takes care of Byrne following his injury, identifies with the local Métis community. Her father, Viraj, was born in India and came to the area as Lord Sexsmith’s attendant, while her mother was an Indigenous woman, one of the “Snake people” who now live further west. As we learn from Sara’s account of Sexsmith’s journey, her mother became the adopted sister of two Stoney brothers and was given the name “Athabasca.” The three of them met up with Sexsmith’s expedition, and it was Sara’s mother who said that the top of the icefield is a “spirit place. Not for the living” (Wharton 1995, 43). “She knew the land better than they did,” one of her brothers explains, “because her people had once lived here in this valley, and even deeper in the mountains” (35). Through the encounter of Sexsmith’s group with Athabasca and her two brothers, Wharton reveals something of the contrast between European and Indigenous conceptions of the natural world.

In the course of Sara’s account, we also learn that Jasper was once a Hudson’s Bay Company post and that, by the time of Byrne and Trask’s arrival, in 1898, it was the site of a Métis settlement. As Sara explains, “The fur trade had gradually died out and there was no longer any material reason to follow the old overland trail,” that is, until people “came looking for the one precious substance that remained here: the gold of solitude and silence” (32). As settlers encroached on the West, the relatively remote Jasper area remained largely untouched by European habitation, at least initially, but already we see shifts in meaning. For Indigenous peoples, the landscape, imbued with spirit, was the source of all life. For fur traders, the area was a source of profit. And, by the close of the nineteenth century, it had become, for white settlers, a place of simplicity and seclusion and, occasionally, of inspiration.

For Trask, however (and for others like him), this silence and splendour translates into a tourist opportunity. Jasper is, for him, a “wild valley waiting for the resourceful young man to see its potential” (65), a potential he is quick to exploit, becoming the part-owner of a newly constructed chalet with its “marvelous glasshouse” (65) and its “immaculate lawns” (66). It is Trask who persuades the “railway magnates to build a spur line from the wide Athabasca valley into this more remote and colder region of the mountains” (65). This is the irony of development: the allure of places like Jasper—their pristine quality, their solitude, the awe they evoke—is destroyed in process of their exploitation. Development brings crowds of visitors, people who have no intrinsic connection to the place or any intention of staying long enough to acquire one. In the process, a relationship embedded in the need for subsistence and founded on reciprocity, respect, and ecological sustainability is displaced by one based on landscape as commodity.

The development of the town and chalet represents a shift from a time “when savage men wrestled with grizzly bears, or were said to have done so” (103), to a time when wildlife is an exotic attraction: “Nineteen-nineteen. A photograph of the era: A black bear, chained to a post at the golf course” (224). Rather than a place where one would dwell, eke out a livelihood, and maintain an embodied connection to place, Jasper National Park becomes a temporary escape for people who are served up lavish comforts. Guests at the chalet are “giddy with joy at the comforts of civilization. Hot running water, wine and cheese, the anticipation of a warm feather bed” (80). As Hepburn points out, “Within an ideology of property and tourism, nature gets packaged for quick consumption” (2001, 72). They are able to gaze on the magnificence of the Rocky Mountains, but the effort once needed to do so is now gone, as is their investment in the experience.

The commodification of the wilderness is further evident in Frank Trask’s guided walking tours and in his “four ice-crawlers” with their “military look” (270). For a price, visitors can now travel by motor coach to the terminus of the glacier and then step into an ice-crawler, which transports them safely and conveniently onto the frozen expanse: “The guests step off the bus dreamily. Lulled in the cradle of the machine” (269). In the minds of Canadian sports enthusiasts, ice is, of course, associated above all with hockey, and it is perhaps significant that Trask makes the novel’s one reference to the sport: imagining ways to exploit the glacier, he thinks, “And in winter, there could be hockey games right on the ice” (253). Like the landscape itself, sport has also been commodified, and, in the process, the connection of sport to the natural environment has weakened. Games that were once played outdoors now take place in an arena, where spectators can watch, not unlike tourists, in relative warmth and comfort. Moreover, much as formerly pristine landscapes have been overrun by development, sports once pursued purely for the sake of competition and the mastery of skill have become mired in broadcast deals, corporate sponsorships, and colossal revenues.

The differing value put on place is perhaps most explicitly articulated in the exchange between Byrne and Trask about the workmen who are cutting down trees along one of the moraines. Byrne, who understands the implications, is outraged:

—Do you know how long those trees have been there, Frank? Hundreds of years. It’s like a little Arctic up there, everything is fragile. The trees grow very slowly that close to the ice.

—And now they’re in the way. Ned, in this world the trees and rocks have to move, not the men.

—That’s not what you told Sara’s people. (250)

Whereas Byrne not only understands but values the glacial ecosystem, Trask does not. Nor is he concerned about the fate of Indigenous communities, such as the Métis families who were also “in the way” and were evicted from Jasper by the government in the face of park development. Unlike the original inhabitants of the area, Trask sees no inherent value in a natural ecosystem, even one that he seeks to exploit. Today, tourists can drive the “Icefields Parkway” from Banff to Jasper, and one senses that, a century later, Trask would be pleased.

TIME AND THE GLACIER

The passage of time is a prominent theme in Icefields, and central to this theme is the notion of geological time, or deep time. Each of the novel’s five main sections is named for a feature associated with glaciation, and, as Pamela Banting points out, these names “parallel the names given to the parts of a fictional plot: névé (initial incident), moraine (rising action), nunatak (climax), ablation zone (falling action), and terminus (dénouement)” (2000, 72). The action of the novel is thus structured around the phases of glaciation, and, as Banting argues, it is the motion of the glacier that gives the narrative its momentum: “It is not through the human characters’ actions but rather through the glacier’s movement that the mysteries of the angel figure are re-addressed (though not solved) and Byrne is released from his quest, thus drawing the narrative to its conclusion” (72).

In the novel, the glacier is associated with interruptions in the standard flow of time. Trapped in the crevasse, Byrne becomes disoriented. “How long have I been here?” he wonders. “Minutes or hours. There was no way to tell” (Wharton 1995, 13). He struggles against “the insane thought that he had been wedged in this crevasse for centuries”:

Freezing into absolute stillness, his thoughts crystallized around one idea. He moved an arm, fumbled at his coat for his pocket watch. He had to know the time.

Time was the one constant. It did not change or freeze into immobility. Time would go on and so would he. (13)

Trapped in the crevasse, Byrne is grasping for something rational and concrete, some assurance of the continuity of life. In this place of sensory and temporal disruption—a place far older than the human ability to process and experience time—his perceptions are irrevocably changed.

Trask has an analogous experience of disorientation, also associated with the glacier and its angel and also marked by the disruption of time. This occurs near the end of the novel, when he and Byrne are out on the icefield. As Byrne packs up to leave, he suggests that Trask stay for a while to enjoy the silence of the place. Watching Byrne make his way home, Trask vows not to “follow after him like a lost tourist” and heads off in a different direction. In the time that has intervened since Trask last climbed the surface of the glacier, as the guide of the expedition on which Byrne had his accident, he has lost his intuitive, embodied connection to the ever-shifting expanse of ice, and his lack of experience with the current terrain leads him astray. He finds himself down in a gully, his sense of spatial location confounded: “The chalet and all other familiar landmarks are hidden from view” (258). With no choice but to retrace his steps, he scrambles back up to the glacier and “is shocked to find himself bent double, gasping for breath, his head spinning. Too much time spent at a desk the last few years” (258–59). Trask’s body does not perform as he would expect, and his ability to predict time also proves unreliable: what should have been a relatively short walk ends up taking hours, with Trask arriving back at the chalet only in the evening.

We often gauge space or distance in relation to time. As Tuan suggests, one explanation for the equation of time and distance is that “units of time convey a clear sense of effort. . . . One hundred paces means one hundred units of a biological rhythm that we know intimately” (1977, 129–30). In this way, a disruption of our embodied sense of physical progress through space entails a disruption in our perception not only of space but also of time. Once we lose our direction, we can no longer predict how long our journey will take us, and we become keenly alert to our surroundings, hoping to find a point of reference. Out on the glacier, Trask spots the red glow of the fire drum at the work camp, which becomes “a beacon to him in the distance”; wedged in the crevasse, Byrne is desperate to pull out his pocket watch. In any situation in which our senses are intensely focused on our embodied experience (including playing a sport), our perception of time changes: events can slow down to a crawl or unfold in an instant.

In Icefields, experiences of spatiotemporal disorientation are associated most directly with the mysterious angel of ice, which, like the glacier itself, advances at a pace too slow for ordinary human perception. Byrne is aware of the gap between human time and geological time: “I lean back on the sun-warmed rock, close my eyes, and listen. The glacier moves forward at a rate of less than one inch every hour. If I could train myself to listen at the same rate, one sound every hour, I would hear the glacier wash up against this rock island, crash like waves, and become water” (152). The deep time of geological evolution is not the experiential time of human beings: in geological time, a human lifespan is an inconsequential moment. Indeed, in the context of Christian cosmology, the ability to perceive the world within the framework of deep time presumably belongs solely to God, the Creator, and it is not entirely surprising that Byrne, observing the glacier, turns to religious imagery. As the ice slowly flows over a steep incline in the underlying rock, it “groans, cracks, thunders, and rears up a cathedral”:

When the sun breaks through the cloud, the cathedral fills with light. The warmer air hollows it into a more baroque, flamboyant shape. Spires, archways, gargoyles begin to flow. Waterfalls set festive ice bells ringing.

Then, slowly, the delicate balance that kept it aloft is undermined. Even as light glorifies it, the cathedral is diminished, begins almost imperceptibly to collapse. Sepulchral booms and crashes attest to hidden vaults and hollows, the shirting instability of the foundation. (161)

The creation and demise of the glacial cathedral mirrors the creation, life, and destruction of the earth as described in biblical narratives. Here, Wharton seems to be linking the geological concept of deep time to Christian cosmology.

Eternity is beyond human comprehension: our perception of the passage of time inevitably culminates with our death. Although angels are typically thought of as offering protection, Judeo-Christian tradition also includes the Angel of Death. In the novel, Freya, the intrepid mountain climber, dies trying to reach the summit of the mountain from which the glacier descends. Her camera is broken in her fatal fall, but two images on the film survive, one of them a portrait of Byrne. Looking at it, Byrne realizes that he has aged: “Prematurely white hair, thin white beard lining a long, bony face. [. . .] Chiselled lines at the corners of his eyes” (213). “The markings of time,” he thinks. “The ice has been at work here too” (213). He imagines the faces of the soldiers leaving to fight in World War I, their “eyes looking away into some place more distant and unspeakable than the depths of a glacier” (214). Eventually, the slow movement of the ice transports his angel to the terminus of the glacier, where it collapses into the water and is gone forever. Ultimately, the disparity between cosmic time, glacial time, and human time—brought into focus by Byrne’s close observations and life experiences—highlights the often myopic nature of human life.

CONCLUSION

Toward the end of Icefields, as Trask contemplates the future development of a bus terminal at the foot of the glacier, destined to feature an “igloo-style” façade and a “glacier diorama,” he thinks triumphantly: “A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!” Wondering whether “it might be possible to import penguins to swim in the melt pool at the terminus,” he reflects, “Of course their wings would have to be clipped” (Wharton 1995, 253). Condensed in this brief passage is a theme that has run throughout the novel: that of enchantment versus disenchantment. “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” is a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the poem that Sara read to Byrne as he was recovering from his fall into the crevasse. The poem is subtitled “Or, A Vision in a Dream,” and, in it, Coleridge writes not only “caverns measureless to man” but also of a “deep romantic chasm”—a “savage” place, “holy and enchanted,” from which a “mighty fountain momently was forced” (1996 [1816], 230). While Wharton’s use of the poem establishes the glacier and its netherworld as a mystical realm, a world of awe and mystery, Byrne’s sense of wonder and dedication to scientific study exemplify how the two can co-exist in one’s conception of real places—a meaningful duality that is in fact deeply antithetical to Trask’s crass, commercial visions.

In contrast, Trask’s reference to the clipping of wings brings us back to the start of the novel and Byrne’s description of the angel in the ice:

The white figure lay on its side, the head turned away from him. Its huge wings were spread wide, one of them cracked obliquely near the tip, the broken pinions slightly detached.

One arm was also visible, outstretched, in the semblance of some gesture that Byrne felt he had seen before, but could not interpret. (11)

Once the light fades, the figure is no longer visible. “A magnificent, impossible figure from a long-forgotten childhood dream,” Byrne thinks (13). In his own deep chasm, Byrne has come face to face with something “impossible,” something that defies interpretation.

The experience of the sublime is, essentially by definition, ineffable—a form of communion that one can experience but not adequately translate into language. At one point in the novel, Hal Rawson, the poet turned mountain guide, explains to Freya why he has recently found himself unable to write poems: “I realized I’d written about nothing that I’d lived through. None of it was my life, my experience.” Freya, herself a writer, is sympathetic: “Words always do that to me,” she says, “even when I'm reporting what we like to call the facts. I think to myself, was that really what I saw, what I felt? But I keep trying, I have to try to nail things down with the exact words.” To this, Hal replies, “I'll try not to mention the infinite, or the ineffable” (114–15).

The point, of course, is that experiences of the sublime are intimate and deeply felt and that there are no “exact words” with which one can “nail down” the infinite and ineffable. As Tuan observes,

Intimate experiences lie buried in our innermost being so that not only do we lack the words to give them form but often we are not even aware of them. When, for some reason, they flash to the surface of our consciousness they evince a poignancy that the more deliberative acts—the actively sought experiences—cannot match. Intimate experiences are hard to express. (1977, 136–37)

In the novel, Byrne, Sexsmith, and Trask all experience the presence of the angel, and all three confront something that they cannot express. But only Byrne is capable of enchantment. Byrne accepts that he has had an intimate encounter with the inexplicable and devotes his life to exploring the mystery, in the course of which he arrives at an understanding of patience and of the human place in nature. In contrast, Sexsmith becomes disenchanted. In actively seeking an experience shaped by his expectations, his hopes of finding a “Grail” of some sort, he overlooks the possibility of wonder and winds up disappointed. Trask is also intent on “deliberative acts”: he is so busy planning the future that he cannot simply be still and experience the present.

In his essay on mountain climbing, McCarthy notes that stories about the experience often depict “climbers transcending ego-centered subjectivity and gaining a felt knowledge of human integration with the natural world” (2008, 164). This is, perhaps, the overarching theme in Icefields: the human need for immersion, for moments when our senses are so completely given over to our experience that we are no longer conscious of ourselves, or of time and space. Byrne is capable of this immersion, this embodied absorption, an experience that, for him, is triggered by his plunge into the “caverns measureless to man” and sustained by the intimate relationship he develops with the glacier. Like King Arthur’s knights, Byrne sets out on a quest to obtain a holy relic, his angel embedded in the ice, but, because he remains open to wonder and enchantment and is attentive to the beautiful complexity of the mountain ecosystem, he finds instead what may be the most divine gift of all—a way of being wholly present in the world, one founded on an understanding of our ecological embeddedness.

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