The Unaccommodated: The Himalaya and the Makers of Their Literature
Amrita Dhar [Amrita Dhar is a graduate student in the English Language and Literature PhD Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has been reading about and visiting the Himalayan mountains since she was ten. She currently runs the Mountaineering Culture Studies Group, an interdisciplinary graduate forum at the University of Michigan.] In this brief note on the reasons, possibilities, and limits holding together—and evoked by—Himalayan mountaineering and its literature, I shall begin in a curious place: a windswept heath on which an aged Shakespearean king unexpectedly finds himself. I shall offer at the very outset that this story of reasons is also a story of reason, and the story of possibilities and fabulous aspiration also a story of great restraint. I shall mark, as I go, the often peculiar origins of works of mountaineering literature, the defences needed for the literature and the activity it seeks to represent, and the emotional and psychological uses the literature is put to by the mountaineering community. I shall end with the heights, asserting that despite its essential loneliness (for to claim any kind of singularity is to be without company) and veritable refusal to translate experience into text (despite all claims that that is precisely what it aims to do), the most engaged—and to my mind most successful—literature of mountaineering seeks but to articulate its author’s profound sense of responsibility, and to perpetuate the very activity and fierce attraction that is its occasion in the first place. Unaccommodation and the Making of Mountains There is perhaps no question with which mountaineering literature has so relentlessly had to grapple with as that of justification. When old King Lear, himself helplessly exposed to a raging storm on the pitiless heath, sees Poor Tom beside him near-naked and profoundly vulnerable, he is suddenly moved to extremest pity: Thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? […] [T]hou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.[i] Poor Tom, with nothing and no one in the world for shelter, and utterly defenceless in the face of an elemental storm, induces a bewildered and aching sympathy in his royal companion. There is something unbearably pitiful about the unaccommodated human being whose only ability is to suffer. He will suffer until he is extinguished, and he will surely be extinguished. Perhaps it were better he were already in his grave. Lear’s contemplation of such a state of man—while he is himself unaccommodated—leads him into what, the play will soon tell us, is a tearing apart of his mind. That way madness lies. To me, there seems to be a curious resonance, here, with the kind of perplexity and disorientation registered by the world that sees mountaineers at their mountaineering. It is almost a foregone conclusion that such a willingness—even desire—to be as unaccommodated as the high-altitude mountaineer on his/her mountain is, must be bordering on madness. Further, that too close a contemplation of the mountaineer’s repeated proximity to the edge of existence can perhaps engender madness. But there are those to whom the question of why they go mountaineering where the levels of risk are high enough to make the exercise seem pointless, is itself pointless. George Mallory’s famous words about Everest, ‘Because it’s there’ (in reply to a newspaper reporter’s question in 1923), variously interpreted as flippant, exasperated, and profound, is nevertheless honest in a way that mountaineers almost a century after find difficult to disavow.[ii] In fact, as David Robertson points out, a lecture Mallory prepared for the Broadhurst Theater on his fundraising tour towards the 1924 Everest expedition has a close and perfectly serious statement not far off being in the same temper. ‘I suppose we go to Mount Everest because—in a word—we can’t help it. Or to state the matter rather differently, because we are mountaineers.’[iii] It is important to note a crucial element betrayed here about the mountaineer’s commitment: he is unaware that by now he can make no distinction between the purpose and the agent. There is no mountaineer unless there is a mountain, but Mallory’s naming of his being a mountaineer as justification for mountaineering suggests the deep and complex engagement of the human agent with that which afforded him that agency. ‘We’ did not become mountaineers overnight. The mountains did that to the men. But now the mountaineers keep going resistlessly back (‘we can’t help it’). And that is how mountains get made. In our day, such an idea can find easy and almost facile confirmation if we look, for instance, at the exponential growth of the tourist industry in higher Nepal (those indigenous to the lands had always lived within striking distance of the peaks, but it was with Western interest in the mountains that mountain-tourism grew in the region), but it is well to remember that Mallory was not the only man unable to tell apart the doer from the deed. Tenzing Norgay, back in Darjeeling after his whirlwind tour overseas following the success of the 1953 Everest expedition, looks at Everest from Tiger Hill in Darjeeling. He recalls pointing out to a group of American ladies long ago, as guides and travellers do even in the present time, the outline of Everest. ‘No, it is not that one,’ he had said. ‘That is Lhotse. Nor that. That is Makalu. It is the other one. The small one.’ This is a true enough statement, as from the south Everest seems unbelievably shy. Yet Norgay reflects on what a strange appellation he had used for the highest mountain on earth: the ‘small one’, he had said. But, he considers, there is also a peculiar aptness to it, ‘for what is Everest without the eye that sees it? It is the hearts of men that make it big or small.’[iv] Deep Play and Unfiltered Experience Anthropologist Sherry Ortner