An Analysis of the Short Story "Sur"

This student paper was sent to me by Mona Elnamoury, a writer and professor in Cairo, Egypt, with whom I correspond. In her last letter she said,

"I finally teach Science fiction for undergraduate students this year! It is a tough but worthy experience. "Sur" is one of the short stories we cover. I got some wonderful feedbacks on it. Attached is one of them from an excellent student, Abdulwahab Khaleefa. If you find it worthy, please place it in your official website for a while. It will be a good push to him and many others."

I am happy to put it up here, as a very fine piece of student scholarship — and as proof that religious and political biases do not control everybody's thinking, and that to assume that they do is a sin against the human spirit.

— UKL

Analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin's "Sur: A Summary Report of the Yelcho Expedition to the Antarctic, 1909-1910"

by Abdulwahab Khaleefa

1* Character List

• The Narrator
  • The unnamed "Supreme Inca" of the expedition.
  • She is from Peru.
  • She is fascinated by several reports of South Pole expeditions, especially of the Britsh National Antarctic Expedition of 1902-1904 by Captain Scott.
  • She seems to be adventurous as she has the desire to "go and see."
  • She is the first leader; seems to regret the expedition; lost some toes on the Pole and is proud to have not left any footprints.
  • She has two children: Rosita and Juanito.
• Juana
  • Peruvian cousin and friend of the narrator.
  • Encourages the narrator to go on the expedition and proposes to write to Carlota. Juana places herself on one level with Scott.
  • Juana is the well-trained, strong part of the group.
• Carlota
  • "The Third Mate" of the expedition.
  • She is from Chile; through her, they meet their benefactor for the expedition.
  • Carlota, the second leader, is resolute and determined to achieve their goal.
• Teresa
  • She is from Peru; she was brought up by servants and went to school in a convent.
  • She got married at 16; seems to be very naive does not know for a long time, that she is pregnant => gives birth to her child on the Pole and names her girl "Rosa del Sur," Rose of the South.
• Zoe
  • She is the one with a gift for naming.
• Berta
  • She is a sculptor, "La Araucana" of the expedition.
• Eva, Pepita, and Dolores
  • They are from Chile, and they are Carlota's friends.
• Captain Luis Pardo
  • Luis Pardo is the captain of the Yelcho, which is a ship of the Chilean Government.
  • He is a "brave officer with a gallant crew" and a "man of honor."
  • He protects the women and wants them to be safe; he is very caring.

2* Plot Overview

Despite its apparent objectivity as "A summary report of the Yelcho expedition to the Antarctic, 1909-1910," the story "Sur" is a surprising piece of gently subversive fiction, narrated by an unnamed woman some years after the events of the story take place. The surprise and the subversion result from the story's feminist stance and from the attendant replacement of the value of "achievement" by "what is large."

In the early paragraphs of the story, its feminism remains latent, hinted at only by the items with which the report will be kept — children's clothes and toys, wedding shoes and finneskos — and by the atypical purpose stated for the expedition: "to go, to see. No more, no less." Further, the trouble encountered in gathering an expeditionary force hints at the narrator's dissatisfaction with what women are or have been made to be, with the stark limits imposed on the average woman by her socially determined role: "So few of those we asked even knew what we were talking about — so many thought we were mad, or wicked, or both!" The following sentences, with their references to parents, husbands, children, and the responsibilities to family that are traditionally a woman's concern, prepare the reader for the first explicit indication that this is to be an all-female expedition: the list of its participants. The knowledge of this expedition's special character colors the rather ordinary story of travel and exploration that follows.

The report of the expedition itself proceeds naturally enough with accounts of the voyage to Antarctica on the Chilean vessel Yelcho, the choice of a site for base camp and the building of "Sudame'rica del Sur," the sledge-journey to the South Pole, and the return to base and, finally, to civilization. Each part of this report, however, reveals in various ways its feminist character. During the initial voyage, for example, the Yelcho is nicknamed "la vaca valiente" (the valiant cow) in memory of the "far more dangerous cows" of Juana's past, and the members of the expedition find themselves "oppressed at times by the kindly but officious protectiveness of the captain and his officers." Such details are embedded in expected surroundings: discussion of the best route for the voyage, celebration of the first iceberg sighted, descriptions of the Ross Sea and the Great Ice Barrier.

Male superiority is subverted in the report's next stage by contrasting the slovenly housekeeping found at Captain Robert Falcon Scott's base hut with the home built by the women of the Yelcho Expedition. Having described the surroundings of Scott's camp as "a kind of graveyard," the narrator details the dirtiness and "mean disorder" of the hut's interior: an open tin of tea, empty meat tins, spilled biscuits, even "a lot of dog turds" on the floor. The narrator's excuse for the men who have left this mess is scathing: "housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs." By contrast, the home created by the women provides "as much warmth and privacy as one could reasonably expect," then becomes at the hands of Berta and Eva "a marvel of comfort and convenience," and is the setting, finally, of the "beautiful forms" Berta sculpts from the ice.

After the Yelcho steams north, leaving the women "to ice, and silence, and the Pole," the southern journey is a model of good planning, good practice, and amazing perseverance. The narrator meticulously details the establishment of supply depots, the superiority of the food they carry, the organization of the southern party, the pain, weariness, even craziness of the terrible trek to the Pole. Even in this account, so fact-filled, the narrator's condescension toward men is clearly revealed: "I was glad... that we had left no sign there, for some man longing to be first might come some day, and find it, and know then what a fool he had been, and break his heart."

The story draws swiftly to its close with the return to base and the laconic report of the return to civilization: "We came back safe." Two feminist moments color these final paragraphs. The matter of Teresa's pregnancy raises the central biological fact of femininity — childbearing. The narrator's response of "anger — rage — fury" is directed first at Teresa for apparently having concealed her pregnancy, but the emotions are quickly directed away from Teresa to the society that has kept her ignorant of what it means to be a woman. In the wider context of the story's feminism, the anger is both self-directed and competitive: the narrator's earlier frustration with female ignorance becomes anger at an unavoidable fact of normal female life, and her anger at Teresa is also recognition that the party's womanhood could have caused the expedition to fail. The story ends, though, on a lighter note, ostensibly added as a postscript years later, but still echoing the narrator's condescension toward other explorers; her grandchildren, she says, may enjoy the secret of her expedition, "but they must not let Mr. Amundsen know! He would be terribly embarrassed and disappointed."

3* Themes and Meanings

The subversion of male superiority that colors the story's progress is balanced by its aim of personal fulfillment and freedom and by its positive feminine acts, revealed in the expedition's command structure, in its making of a home, and in its emphasis on forethought over prowess.

The narrator's natural human curiosity-the sort that might begin any story of travel-provides the first impetus to the Yelcho Expedition; she is drawn to "that strange continent, last Thule of the South, which lies on our maps and globes like a white cloud, a void, fringed here and there with scraps of coastline, dubious capes, supposititious islands, headlands that may or may not be there: Antarctica." The expedition's real justification, however, seems more specifically personal and feminine, the desire to break out of biologically and socially imposed limitations; this sense is revealed in the narrator's grief for "those we had to leave behind to a life without danger, without uncertainty, without hope." The freedom the women find on the ice of Antarctica is a freedom achieved by shedding familiar securities and points of reference, a freedom that leaves them with only themselves: "It was overcast, white weather, without shadows and without visible horizon or any feature to break the level; there was nothing to see at all. We had come to that white place on the map, that void, and there we flew and sang like sparrows."

The women's establishment of a command structure that is never used, their delight in making a home in the ice, and their patient preparation for the trek to the South Pole are possible because of a fundamental difference between their expedition and those of male explorers. Their goal contrasts with the "scientific accomplishments" of earlier and later explorers, with their desire "to be first." This contrast is explained partly by the narrator's sense that as women the members of the Yelcho Expedition are "by birth and upbringing, unequivocally and irrevocably, all crew" rather than officers, and it is provided with a more explicit rationale as the narrator comments on the ugly traces left by earlier expeditions. She muses that "the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul." If her final words, written years later, contain any regret, she hides it well: "We left no footprints, even."

4* Style and Technique

In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "A novelist's business is lying." She noted further that novelists may "use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies" and that "this weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention." Her story "Sur" foregrounds this "peculiar and devious" practice, for in it the factive and the fictive, explorer's log and wanderer's yarn, strive for dominance. The fictive wins.

The level, reportorial tone of "Sur" is established partly by the narrator's distance in time from the events she reports — memory, like reflections in a glass, levels what would in fact be three-dimensionally alive — but more concretely by the selection and organization of details in the story told. The account of the origin of the expedition, for example, carefully outlines the sequence of the narrator's growing interest in Antarctica, naming names, indicating dates, supplying the reader with the sources of her knowledge. However, these are also the sources of her desire, and the reader cannot miss the vocabulary of emotion that laces the list of facts ("my imagination was caught," "I . . . followed with excitement," "filled me with longing"), the telling hyperbole of "reread a thousand times," and the romantic inversion of the world in the phrase "last Thule of the South," appropriating centuries of geographic lore in a single act of the making mind.

Careful indications of position, records of temperatures and other weather conditions, meticulous accounting for distances traveled, even the qualification of the accuracy of such measurements with a note that "our equipment was minimal" — these details enforce the illusion of factuality that the story seeks to create.

The narrator is quite conscious of the fictive role she and her companions play in Antarctica and later at home. Zoe, with her "gift for naming," for example, begins to fill "that white place on the map" with names that the women recognize as having effective factual status only for them. The "invisible cattle, transparent cattle pastured on the spindrift snow" are recognized, too, as products of minds "a little crazy," but this is the insanity of art, more formally realized in later years as the narrator's children hear stories of "a great, white, mad dog named Blizzard... and other fairy tales."

Like Berta's ice sculptures the narrator's experience of Antarctica can be preserved only in stories. Because its truth — more human, at last, than strictly feminine — cannot be truly said in words, it cannot be brought north: "That," says the narrator with sadness, perhaps, but also with a sense of freedom, "is the penalty for carving in water."

Copyright © 2007 by Abdulwahab Khaleefa

Website Copyright © 2001-2007 by Ursula K. Le Guin