#i was raised as a christian why do i knwo so little about christian ideas of the soul

[ilmapatsas]

Yess! This made me think of Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death - there's an interesting discussion about the psychoanalytic concept of anality & its associations with death and the dissolution of the symbolic, that I think dovetails very neatly with central issues in the Terror.

The upsetting thing about anality is that it reveals that all culture, all man’s creative life-ways, are in some basic part of them a fabricated protest against natural reality, a denial of the truth of the human condition, and an attempt to forget the pathetic creature that man is. (61)

The destructive power of anality derives from the dual understanding of man that is also inherent to Christianity - the mortal body and the immortal soul, which elevates man above animals in the natural order. The concepts of anality and excrement unsettle that arrangement. Becker has the following to say about that duality:

[Man] is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. [...] Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. [...] His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. (53)

[A man's] main task in life becomes the denial of what the anus represents: that in fact, he is nothing but body so far as nature is concerned. Nature’s values are bodily values, human values are mental values, and though they take the loftiest flights they are built upon excrement, impossible without it, always brought back to it. [...] The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death. (59)

A central concern in The Terror is how the arctic expedition exposes the problematics in this exact duality. Their act of hubris is an attempt to survive on the symbolic, on uniformed English gentlemanliness alone; to completely transcend, via gestures of Christian virtue and the empire, the physical practicalities of the environment and their own selves.

Their arctic stint forcibly returns their attentions back to those realities, while grinding away at the social order that grants them their symbolic selves. Their equipment and training fails to meet the demands of the environment. Their uniform, procedure and decorum go from dignified to absurd, even to humiliating (best exemplified by Hodgson toward the end, but it is already there in a degree from the start of E1 IMO). Their bodies starve and bleed; the physical ingestion of lead eats away at their minds, situating even that - what should be the essence of the disembodied self - firmly into the physical body.

And yes, if Becker's logic is followed, anality and excrement point along precisely the same vector, at the fallible and animal nature of their bodies. And it is very interesting that many of Crozier's pivotal character moments happen around the seat of ease.

And an additional fact about anality and the seat of ease. As per Becker, the avoidance of anality is a driving force in the life of man - and therefore anality itself is central as well. Congruently, the seat and its associated activities are permanent fixtures. The seat is a reminder that these facts of embodiment were always there, invisible but constant. The reality of bodily excretion is built into the ship, as it is built into their society, as it is built into their selves. It has always required effort for them to pretend to be unaware of it.

But even more immediately, [anality] represents man’s utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant feminine beauty, [...] to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out—the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill: to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. (62)

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And a bonus curiosity: In 'Buggery and the British Navy' (maybe a little beside the point since the paper is focused on the 1700s but still), Arthur Gilbert suggests that this conceptual connection between anality and death may also have factored into the Navy's aggressive approach to prosecuting the crime of sodomy. Via fear of anality, homosexual activity becomes inherently linked with ideas of death, and with both physical and symbolic disintegration. So that's a fun symbolism.

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And a bonus bonus curiosity: The Denial of Death apparently gave rise to something called Terror Management Theory which sounds like maybe it could have helped avoid their entire situation, hm

Something something the captain’s seat of ease is a signifier of vulnerability, intimacy, and debasement. Every scene involving the privy results in a dynamic shift, either within Crozier, his relationships to others, or the expedition as a whole. It is the place where the impenetrability and wholeness of his body is questioned, where the solidity of his authority, legitimacy, and identity as Captain (a socially constructed rank enshrined through violence and procedure) are turned on their head. It’s a place one debases oneself that is literally disguised so as not to upset Victorian sensibilities, and yet also exposed to the cabin, leaving the user vulnerable to being witnessed in such a state of undoneness.

Something something “Cyborg Manifesto,” something something, the break down of the limitations of socially imposed identities, something something, leaky bodies, something something, culture-nature divide, something something, ya know?