Fuite au Nord" symposium

From the navigation of Pytheas of Marseilles to the misty horizons of Thule (8th century BC.) to the Arctic crossings of Knud Rasmussen, Fridtjof Nansen and Paul-Émile Victor (20th century), via the British Elizabethan and Victorian expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage, the Western imaginary of voyages to the North tends to privilege the motif of a race to the North: a concrete and imperialistic quest for territory, routes, material and human resources; a symbolic quest for heroic feats - often virile - both individual and collective, for self-improvement and national prestige...

We propose to analyze another aspect of representations of travel to cold countries, which would be the flip side of the race to the north: escape to the north. In his novel Fleeing to the North, published in German under the title Flucht in den Norden in 1934, Klaus Mann transposes and transfigures his situation of exile in the face of Nazism through the story of Johanna, a young German woman whose affiliation with communism forces her to take refuge in Finland in the 1930s. For Johanna, the northern landscapes are the cradle of a double discovery: the serenity of northern nature, but also love and happiness with Ragnar, which blurs the threatening historical background of a country soon to be torn apart by the annexation ambitions of its neighbors. Escape to the north is synonymous with spiritual and amorous retreat; with the privilege accorded to individual freedom and fulfillment at the expense of collective responsibility; with withdrawal from the turmoil of history and the violence of the modern world in favor of refuge in a universe of immemorial purity and beauty.

The motif of flight to the north thus invites us to reshape the Western imaginary of the North, heir to a travel literature shaped as much by medieval Icelandic sagas recounting the discovery of Greenland and Newfoundland (Vínland) as by tales of Arctic exploration. The motif of flight to the north sketches out a new cartography of danger and hostility, shifting the lines of opposition between North and South and creating new representations.