The frozen continent of the south--a land of white denial, empty as air and full as the void--has spawned a history of negative discovery, a hermeneutics of despair. (1) The intractable ice has driven human beings to distraction, to violent projections of rigid orders, to quick annihilations of all categories. These are the two forms of failed Antarctic interpretation: the exoteric and the esoteric. Exoteric readings of the icy terra incognita have resolved into aggressive cartographies, efforts to wrench the other into the same, mystery into commodity. Failure to achieve these distortions has ended in revenge against some synecdoche for the immense ice, a scapegoat bearing explorer's chagrin over the recalcitrant wastes. Esoteric glosses of the southern polar region have found other guises, other ruins. Not lines of latitude, but labyrinths of surreal speculation have informed the souls straining to find the secret meaning of the southern pole. Explorers hungry for the spiritual inane in the end know that their mental patterns are bound to fall short of the mystery at the bottom of the globe. From this inability to name the sacred grows revenge but sadness: the ego, blocking union with what is forever unmapped, is dented and demeaned. Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797) and Poe in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) explore the divided psychology of polar exploration--the desire to master the void, the yearning to merge with the plenitude. The Mariner and Pym oscillate between these two poles. Doing so, they move between two kinds of violence--the sadistic and the masochistic. These forms of aggression often translate into two kinds of despair--selfish dejection over the failure to control recalcitrant ice, charitable sadness over orders dissolving before the abyss. When both characters briefly transcend the fears and desires of their diminished egos, they experience polar apocalypse: the ice as opaque waste, a threat to be mastered by imperial will, but as a fourfold revelation: an emptiness that disarms full orders; a window through which shine polarities formerly divided; a mirror in which marriages between subject and object appear; a nothing beyond yet sustaining all things. But this abysmal revelation is as mercurial as air. It shivers the Mariner into a new sight only to leave him shaken, bewildered, melancholy; it shocks Pym to fresh vision but teaches him nothing but cognitive numbness. Coleridge and Poe were deep students of Antarctic exploration, aware of its exoteric and esoteric forms. (2) The exoteric history of the Antarctic is grounded on the geography of reversal, on the idea that the unknown is the exact opposite of the known, an unruly not opposed to a manageable is. This negation grows from fear and desire; fear of the unfamiliar, desire to subdue the strange to the lesser side of a hierarchical divide. Most ancient cartographers depicted the bottom of the unexplored south as a frozen waste mirroring the top of the northern hemisphere. The North Pole was Arktikos; the South Pole, Antarktikos. The inhabited north was oikoumene, the familiar world; the blank south, antichthon, counter-world. In the Middle Ages, the southern hemisphere was simply, brumae, fogs; frigida, frozen; perusta, burned. Its denizens were monstrous: Blemyae, with eyes and mouths on their breasts; Himantopodes, who crawl on four legs; Anthropophagi, cannibals. These beings and their habitats were chaos opposed to and supporting Christian orders. In the Renaissance, when religious terrors were giving way to entrepreneurial fantasies, cartographers employed another sort of reversal, envisioning the unexplored southern hemisphere as a land of unlimited wealth capable of countering the financial constraints of the familiar world. Sailors navigated southern seas in search of India. They found that the oceans under South America were monstrous wastes but fecund flows. Geographers believed that Tierra del Fuego was the northern tip of a vast Antarctic Eden waiting to be plundered. …