The Naked Mountaineer in the Mirror of Myth

As Margret Grebowicz notes, mountaineering today has its own global audience and its influence extends beyond the mountain world (2021: 11). As a result, the expressive “fundamental ontology” of the limits explored by mountaineering has dissolved into the world in the form of catchy metaphors exported far beyond the highmountain context. A phrase “the Everest of…” has come to describe success in every domain, climbing signifies the “vertical mobility” of personal and individual development, and the climbing route is a metaphor for a good life, subordinated to successive goals (Grebowicz 2021: 15–19). This state of affairs is confirmed, among other things, by the fact that the climbers themselves have specialised in running various types of motivational courses for the business sector. In both cases, one can speak of a kind of “deontologisation of mythology”: “classical” discourse of mountaineering (in the form of its ethos), largely “untethers” itself from the ontology of cultural concreteness uncovered by the mountaineering experience and becomes highly metaphorical. Of course, this happens largely through media representations of various kinds. As Grebowicz points out, in this day and age, Mallory’s response has been replaced by HD images, and GoPro camera videos are a kind of a priori experience (2021: 13); social media accounts, also often based on photographs, become the equivalent of earlier narratives; discussions about partnerships and the nature of high altitude activities are based on live tracking of rescues and online maps. However, this is not only a kind of “simulation” of the highmountain experience based on multiple representations, but also a secondary metaphorisation of the mountaineering ethos. “Mythology” remains, but undergoes not so much a reevaluation as a rearrangement that changes both the style of the narrative and the place assigned in it to the human beingalpinist.

It seems to me that the difference built on a common foundation is mainly formal and occurs between the concepts of myth and discourse cited by Rejowska-Pasek. Obviously, there is no room here for an indepth analysis of the two concepts and the relationship between them. I would like to highlight only the key aspects by referring to the proposals of two towering thinkers, a philosopher and an anthropologist, who can be considered representative in this matter: Foucault and Lévi-Strauss.