As such, Action resurrects associations between gender, virtue and the body present in Victorian and Edwardian constructions of manliness and maintains the special place afforded to (Alpine) mountains as health-giving, recuperative and restorative sanctuaries for male body projects.This paper uses Actor Network Theory to study rock climbing as a technologically mediated pursuit and to argue that climbers are more-than-human fusions comprised of the human and non-human. The paper situates Action in relation to Montague’s more famous work, Disenchantment (1922), and contends that the story was a response to Montague’s diagnosis of post-war ills.
The story is an exploration of the experience of degeneration and how it could be overcome through the agency, willpower and awareness of the male climbing body. It does so by means of a close reading of Action (1928), a short story composed by journalist and novelist C.E. This paper adds to this literature through a consideration of the place of mountains and mountaineering in post-war recovery. Victimhood, emotional survival and disablement have featured in recent scholarship as a means to shed light on the psycho-social products of war and how these have fed into new or reconstructed forms of male subjectivity and agency. In so doing, Everest was constructed paradoxically as both a unique field site which needed to be studied in vivo, and as a ‘natural laboratory’ which could produce generalisable knowledge about the human (male) body.Ĭultural historians have vigorously debated the impact of the First World War in shaping male subjectivities and (heroic) masculinities.
A holistic, environmentally situated sort of science used a range of (often non-scientific) expertise to prove the laboratory wrong time after time. Consequently, high-altitude respiratory physiology has prioritised not the laboratory, but the field. Predicting what would happen to the first human beings to climb that high was therefore literally a matter of life or death – here inaccurate models could kill. The so-called ‘death zone’ of Mount Everest is a liminal space a change in weather could make the difference between a survivable mountain top, and site where the human respiratory system cannot maintain basic biological functions.
When the nature that you are modelling is something as large as the tallest terrestrial mountain on earth, and as mysterious (at least until 1953) as the reaction of the human body to the highest point on the earth’s surface, mapping between laboratory and ’real world’ is a tricky process. Often the truth value of a scientific claim is dependent on our faith that laboratory experiments can model nature. Using autobiographies, biographies and expedition accounts, this chapter discusses the accommodation of a tradition of English national hero alongside other types of male adventurer whose motivations and ambitions in climbing at high-altitude point to different traditions and subcultural experiences. However, their selection and social construction as heroic leaders came at the expense of others who deviated from norms and expectations of the aristo-military imperial adventurer. It will argue that in both cases qualities of manliness were intrinsic to their selection as leaders. The historical and ideological relationship between national enterprise and normative (‘heroic’) types of masculinity will be interrogated through a study of Hunt, whose leadership led to success for Tenzing and Hillary on the first ascent of Everest in 1953, and Bonington, who was responsible for the first British ascent of Everest, by its South West Face, in 1975. This paper explores the notion of heroic leadership in a comparison of two men who were at the forefront of national and imperial success in the mountains of the Himalaya – Colonel John Hunt and Chris Bonington.
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