Means and motives

Abstract

"In Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer writes, “in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace” (136). Certainly, such transcendental language is nothing new to mountaineering discourse, as the mountaintop has been the place to receive the word of God since, at least, the time of Moses. However, today, when we exist in a state in which, following Donna Haraway, “we are cyborgs” (191), the notion of transcendence sought by mountaineers, a transcendence still rooted in Enlightenment notions of subject consolidation, is troublingly hierarchical. Krakauer, with his intimate understanding of mountaineering mythology, connects past and present attitudes toward technological aids in climbing. He writes, Relying on bottled oxygen as an aid to ascent is a practice that’s sparked acrimonious debates since the British first took experimental oxygen rigs to Everest in 1921 . . . Initially, the foremost critic of bottled gas was George Leigh Mallory, who protested that using it was “unsporting, and therefore un-British.” (152) On the facing page, Krakauer links the modernist icon of mountaineering with the contemporary: “In the 1970s, the famed Tyrolean alpinist Reinhold Messner emerged as the leading proponent of gasless climbing, declaring that he would ascend Everest ‘by fair means’ [that is, without bottled oxygen] or not at all” (153).