Interestingly, Kolbuszewski’s postulate was fulfilled, but did not produce new literary forms; at the same time, however, it fitted well into the framework of colloquial journalistic discourse. It is not a question of subjectivising mountaineering narratives, but of condensing them: instead of the climbing route shown in an expedition book sometimes taking the form of a monotonous itinerary, in a biography we get impressions of the extreme journey of life, which is supposed to answer key questions about the human being. This is where the “naked mountaineer” comes in:
These are not the heroines and heroes that extreme sport performers are sometimes falsely believed to be: “We, too, are human beings” […] “The mountains are the mirror of your soul,” says someone else looking at us as if we were a mountain […] What makes the extreme sport performers different from us “normal” people […]? (Zopfi 2010: 6-7).
Here is a series of questions asked on the human/nothuman demarcation line that leads towards the human being, while the mountains are, as it were, absorbed into his or her cognitive and existential horizon.
The phenomenon I am pointing to can easily be linked to the phenomenon of the “anthropological dream” described by Michel Foucault that shapes our contemporary humanist “sensibility”; perhaps a variety of which is the “mountaineering dream.” According to Foucault, the figure of Man is merely the driving force behind the machinery of contemporary discourse: “[…] the precritical analysis of what man is in his essence becomes the analytic of everything that can, in general, be presented to man’s experience” (2005: 163). Thus, the human being is the pretext of the discourse of knowledge, and his or her truth – the foundation of all truths. This discourse is made possible by the ambiguity and the split of man – homo duplex – between oppositions postulated in the humanities and sociology at the turn of the 20th century [7]. Significantly, this referring to the “Man” ad infinitum has the effect of neutralising the context, which becomes knowable only through the figure in question. Paradoxically, however, the more we talk about the man, the more he disappears behind the veil of discourse. It seems to me legitimate to draw an analogy between the anthropological dream and Rejowska-Pasek’s proposition cited earlier, but with a minor correction: it is not the mountaineering discourse that is fractured, but the epistemological fracture – contemporarily intended to bare the mountaineer – is what makes this discourse possible. The fabric of the discourse is, in effect, so “natural” that it imperceptibly veils this nakedness.
[7] Foucault identifies four fundamental correlations: human being as object and subject of knowledge (Being-Representation); the Empirical and Transcendental; the Cogito and the Unthought; the Retreat and Return of the Origin (2005: 127–156).