Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 98
92
Popular Culture Review
beyond reason almost by definition. There was nothing I could do as I watched
my teammates’ financial futures disappear into thin air” (28).
The satire plays on the dark comedy inherent in human helplessness in
the face of mortality, of course, but also on the reality that it is the very idea of a
noble autonomy from market forces that successfully markets both guided climbs
and non-fictional accounts such as Into Thin Air. To be fair to Krakauer and to
what I will call the climbing community, however, it should be recognized that
these inconsistencies are explicitly considered by many writers interested in the
sport. The successful popularization of climbing as a spectator sport has helped to
impose on its representation a certain responsibility for entertaining, not only a
comparatively sedentary audience, but also this audience’s conflicting responses
to the idea of social elitism. Consequently, contemporary representations of expe
dition climbing, an expensive sport requiring leisure time for the acquisition of the
skills necessary for scaling peaks, are obliged to extol a certain elitism and at the
same time to condemn a culture marked by the class differences sustaining social
elitism. In the example of Into Thin Air, Krakauer’s social critique enlists the
popular audience by casting the story as a spiritual journey.
An interview of Krakauer a year after the disaster on Everest begins with
a comment from a Sherpa’s autobiography that functions as a device for ground
ing climbing in an originary ethos disassociated with the opulence and excess of
the American social elite. At the beginning of the discussion. Outside interviewer
Mark Bryant cites the autobiography of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who made the
first ascent of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953 and who had also chosen
to climb with a Canadian romantic named Earl Denman in 1947. Says Norgay:
“Any man in his right mind would have said no. But I couldn’t say no. For in my
heart I needed to go, and the pull of Everest was stronger for me than any force on
earth.” Krakauer responds to his interviewer by responding to Norgay’s statement
from the heart.
Yeah, I love that quote. Among the reasons I love it is because it
illustrates that while climbers sometimes tend to think of Sherpas
as mainly being in it for the money, here was someone who’d been
trying to get on a successful Everest team since 1933 and was as
deeply “in its grip,” as you say, as I was 50 years later. I’d had this
secret desire to climb Everest that never left me from the time I
was nine and Tom Hombein and Willi Unsoeld, a friend of my
father’s, made it in ’63. They were my childhood heroes, and
Everest was always a big deal to me, though I buried the desire
until Outside called. And as critical as I’ve been of some of the
guides and clients in the magazine piece and in the book, on one
level I identify with them very deeply. I had summit fever as bad