Abnormal fears: the queer Arctic in Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter

Abstract

With focus on queer resistance emanating from place, this article examines Michelle Paver’s 2010 novel Dark Matter: A Ghost Story, set in the 1930s and focused on an all-male expedition to Svalbard. As representatives of the norm, the fictional expedition members attempt to enforce heteronormative models of interpretation characterizing depictions of the Arctic, but several aspects blur the boundaries between previously discreet categories. Starting from Sara Ahmed’s discussions about spatial and existential orientation in Queer Phenomenology (2006), the article maps how the Arctic is imagined and perceived by Jack Miller, the novel’s protagonist. Although hoping that Svalbard will constitute a productive testing ground for a particular kind of inter-war, British masculinity, specificities of place represent a progressively more threatening transgression of what Jack perceives of as normal. The Arctic is thus initially constructed as a stable place; geographical particularities then overturn possibilities for Jack’s orientation, and supernatural occurrences finally violate boundaries between past and present, sane and mad. What Ahmed refers to as ‘queer moments’ that slant that subject’s perception of the world are in the novel produced by the actual as well as the supernatural Arctic: they highlight a continuous, geographically specific resistance to categorization.