At this point, I would like to draw attention to the context in which the said series of oppositions may be used. In classical mountaineering narratives, they took on a spatial character, inscribed in the mountaineering route. They defined and were an expression of the symbolic relationship between “here” and “there,” “high” and “low,” but formed a concrete ontology. Nowadays, they seem to be more and more clearly inscribed in the framework of subjectivity in the form of states, behaviour, reactions of the individual subject to constant interpretation. This trend is responsible, I believe, for the great popularity of all kinds of mountaineering biographies, autobiographies and interviewessays, mostly of a memoir nature, which have superseded the expedition books [5]. It is significant that back in 1960, Jacek Kolbuszewski asked in the title of his review: “Czego nam potrzeba: Notatnika alpejskiego, czy Siedmiu kręgów wtajemniczenia?” [“What we need: The Alpine Diary or The Seven Circles of Initiation?”]. Comparing Utracki’s and Szczepański’s books, Kolbuszewski insisted on the form of conveying the climbing experience: the former reviewed author “does not really experience the climbing” (although he records it precisely), thus “losing the human being,” whereas the latter author “gives up […] the dramatic nature of the description and the dramatic nature of the action in favour of showing the human psyche”; according to Kolbuszewski, “true literature” of mountaineering should follow the latter path (1960: 39–40). As a result, the Polish expedition book, although still very popular until the 1980s, was constantly criticised from literary and literary studies standpoints (Kolbuszewski 1961: 23–24, Tumidajewicz 1991: 106–110)[6].
Two points should be strongly emphasised here. Firstly, it should be remembered that from the very beginning the British expedition book was accompanied by personal accounts, and over time subjectivism became more and more a component of this convention (Holata 1991). Secondly, the “schematicism” of the postwar Polish expedition book is not due to the insufficient erudition of the mountaineering community, but to the firmly established cultural patterns organising the highaltitude experience around the model of the climbing route. At the same time, it would be naïve to claim that “sincere” (auto)biographies are similarly “schema-free” and thus “truer”.
[5] This observation is rather intuitive and requires verification. Of course, I do not claim that (auto)biographies did not appear in earlier years, but there were rather fewer of them and they took on a somewhat different form (suffice it to recall, for example, Hillary’s View from the Summitor Kukuczka’s Mój pionowy świat [My Vertical World]).
[6] A cultural studies approach avoids taking high culture as a criterion to value the “quality” of this literature (Pacukiewicz 2010: 218–231).