Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 96
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Popular Culture Review
and cultural imbalances evident in climbing culture, itself a figure for American
culture as a whole. Although he did couch his social criticism more mildly in Into
Thin Air than in his more recent interview in Outside Magazine, the author’s selfrecriminating theme of the inevitable consequences of hubris was not wasted on
the book’s sizable audience. That the cultural problem critiqued in Into Thin Air is
a result of the hubris of social class was another crucial point not missed by many
Americans, historically uncomfortable with the very concept of class, and
Krakauer’s success as a popular writer has been predicated on the content of his
social analysis as much as it has also been dependent on his finely narrated drama
of mountaineering.
The publication of the account of the Everest disaster on May 1st, 1997
(coincidentally, international workers’ day) was heralded in the popular media and
provoked extended debate about the author’s perspective on expedition climbing,
an elite activity and a form of recreation that captures the popular imagination.
Although mountain climbing relies on pre-modem, pedestrian means of locomo
tion, narratives about it are communicated to spectators through high-tech modem
media of nearly every kind, including television, news magazines, journalism in
daily newspapers, and reporting via the Internet. The contemporary explosion of
interest in mountaineering is not entirely novel, of course: mountain ascents have
been, since the inception of mountaineering in the late 1700s, popular news in
many countries. Moreover, rival national efforts to scale 29,000-foot Everest, the
highest peak in the world, have always been related to the competitive stmggle
between entire nations for imperial influence in the world. Notably, it is the Brit
ish, with the most far-flung modem empire, who have most successfully defined
the ethos of mountain climbing. When Sir George Leigh Mallory protested in
1921 that using bottled oxygen as an aid to climbing was “unsporting and there
fore un-British” {Into Thin Air 152), he reiterated an ethos of low-tech sportsman
ship that is tied not only to nationalism but to upper-class moral claims on the
highest point of the world. He spoke as if to prove that, even without modem
technology, the British nevertheless possess the innate character certifying their
right to surmount the highest point on the globe.
In the tradition of such a transcendental climbing ethos, much of Into
Thin Air excoriates the commercialization of guided climbing dependent on cor
porate sponsorship. Defending a romantic anti-capitalist tradition that would situ
ate climbing as a potent symbol of autonomy from the power of the market shap
ing social life, Krakauer draws from the writings of 19th-century climbers and
literary figures to uphold an elite ardor for purity and danger. The massive circu
lation of his defense of recreational purity suggests, however, that the air breathed
by climbers is not so rarefied (or thin, as declared in the title of his book) as it
might at first appear, for the cultural politics of class are climbers’ very oxygen.