Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 98

92 Popular Culture Review beyond reason almost by definition. There was nothing I could do as I watched my teammates’ financial futures disappear into thin air” (28). The satire plays on the dark comedy inherent in human helplessness in the face of mortality, of course, but also on the reality that it is the very idea of a noble autonomy from market forces that successfully markets both guided climbs and non-fictional accounts such as Into Thin Air. To be fair to Krakauer and to what I will call the climbing community, however, it should be recognized that these inconsistencies are explicitly considered by many writers interested in the sport. The successful popularization of climbing as a spectator sport has helped to impose on its representation a certain responsibility for entertaining, not only a comparatively sedentary audience, but also this audience’s conflicting responses to the idea of social elitism. Consequently, contemporary representations of expe dition climbing, an expensive sport requiring leisure time for the acquisition of the skills necessary for scaling peaks, are obliged to extol a certain elitism and at the same time to condemn a culture marked by the class differences sustaining social elitism. In the example of Into Thin Air, Krakauer’s social critique enlists the popular audience by casting the story as a spiritual journey. An interview of Krakauer a year after the disaster on Everest begins with a comment from a Sherpa’s autobiography that functions as a device for ground ing climbing in an originary ethos disassociated with the opulence and excess of the American social elite. At the beginning of the discussion. Outside interviewer Mark Bryant cites the autobiography of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who made the first ascent of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953 and who had also chosen to climb with a Canadian romantic named Earl Denman in 1947. Says Norgay: “Any man in his right mind would have said no. But I couldn’t say no. For in my heart I needed to go, and the pull of Everest was stronger for me than any force on earth.” Krakauer responds to his interviewer by responding to Norgay’s statement from the heart. Yeah, I love that quote. Among the reasons I love it is because it illustrates that while climbers sometimes tend to think of Sherpas as mainly being in it for the money, here was someone who’d been trying to get on a successful Everest team since 1933 and was as deeply “in its grip,” as you say, as I was 50 years later. I’d had this secret desire to climb Everest that never left me from the time I was nine and Tom Hombein and Willi Unsoeld, a friend of my father’s, made it in ’63. They were my childhood heroes, and Everest was always a big deal to me, though I buried the desire until Outside called. And as critical as I’ve been of some of the guides and clients in the magazine piece and in the book, on one level I identify with them very deeply. I had summit fever as bad