Returning to the theme of nakedness, it can be said that the discourse of mountaineering makes the “nakedness” of the mountaineer its ad hoc content, whereas myth seeks not so much to reveal “the naked man” (significantly so, this [L’Homme nu] is the title of the final volume of the Mythologiques series by the French structuralist) as to present him in its mirror [10].
Minimized Oppositions
To summarise the considerations so far, it would be fair to say that, firstly, rather than pointing to the rapture between myth and discourse, in the case of mountaineering we should think of the continuity of myth and, secondly, when trying to determine the significance of the mountaineer in contemporary culture, rather than revealing his or her “bare humanity,” we ought to see him or her as a function of mythic narrative and assume that their essence is revealed in the mirror of myth. But how do we reconcile this take with the shift in narrative convention signalled at the beginning of our considerations?
Adhering to the structuralist view of myth, we touch upon a significant paradox here. On the one hand, in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, myths “are interminable” (1969: 6), yet at the same time he suggests in the title of one of his texts that myths die… Here we touch on the question of the changing form of mythological narrative.
According to the French anthropologist, any change of narrator results in a modification of myth, especially when myth is transferred between social groups (Lévi-Strauss 1990: 675). In the case of mountaineering narratives, we are dealing with just such a transfer but doubled: with the transition between expedition book and biography, there is a shift from a somewhat collective subject to an individualised subject; in turn, mountaineering discourse (not only literature) is of such interest that it has become, as I have already indicated, universally useful, especially for some originally “non-alpine” social groups, although it serves for them primarily as a provider of capacious metaphors. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss states that although these transformations may take different shapes (e.g. concerning a message or a code) and occur in different contextual relations (myth–myth, community–community), nevertheless they always “respect a sort of principle of conservation of mythical material, by which any myth could always come from another myth” (Lévi-Strauss 1976a: 256). This means that even a change that leads to the scraping off of a particular myth does not erase its structural reflections, which become the foundation of another myth.
[10] This is why Lévi-Strauss calls the study of myths anaclastic. On the structuralist metaphor of the mirror cf. Pacukiewicz (2016: 37–39).