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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 45.1(2022)
Books and Mountains  
(An Introduction)
Jernej Habjan
The modern fascination with mountains and mountain climbing 
has been noticed in such classical texts of cultural history as Georg 
Simmel’s “Alpenreisen,” Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Paul Veyne’s 
“L’alpinisme,” Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, 
and Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory. In the process, mountain-
eering has been associated with “the wholesale opening-up and enjoy-
ment of nature” (Simmel 95), the “old Alpine myth . . . which Gide 
rightly associated with Helvetico-Protestant morality” (Barthes 74), 
“the discovery and inventory of the world” (Veyne 41), “the desire to 
be recognized as superior” (Fukuyama 319), and “a peculiar mixture 
of self-affirmation and self-effacement” (Schama 498). No such inter-
est exists for mountaineering literature. Whereas mountaineering has 
long been recognized as a feature of modern culture, mountaineering 
literature remains underresearched, despite its obvious potential for a 
cultural history of mountains and mountaineering.
Worse still, there is a scholarly interest in literary approaches to 
mountains, but it seems to be limited to canonical poetic thematiza-
tions of mountain landscapes. In literary studies, mountains are a theme 
rather than a form-giving element. The focus is on canonical writers 
and their thematization of mountains, not on mountaineers and their 
autobiographical informing of experience where mountaineering is not 
just one of a myriad of possible themes but the very praxis that informs 
the narrative, the narrative’s end rather than means.
This cluster of essays aims to remedy this state of affairs. It brings 
together work by scholars who are interested in both rethinking the liter-
ary canon and unearthing the uncanonical. The poets are stripped of their 
aura, while the mountaineers are acknowledged for their writing. As a 
result, the canon is questioned both for what it includes and for what it 
does not. Mountains cease to be one possible source of literary inspiration 
and instead become the very reason for the existence of one kind of litera-
ture. Ultimately, one type of author and reader, the national one, makes 
way for a new, potentially international community of letters.
The cluster opens with Aleksander Bjelčevič’s article on the con-
stitutive properties of mountaineering autobiographies, including 
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PKn, letnik 45, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2022
narrative flashbacks and flash forwards, juxtapositions of motives, 
metaphoricity, dynamic narrative tempos, reflexivity, multiple narra-
tors, dramatic dialogue, and jargon. Against this backdrop, Delphine 
Moraldo’s article can be read as a kind of contextualist complement to 
Bjelčevič’s textual analysis, as it provides a literary sociology of British 
and French mountaineering autobiographies in order to trace their role 
in the construction of the modern ideology of excellence. German, the 
third major language of early mountaineering literature, is covered by 
Johann Georg Lughofer, who shows that the contemporary German-
language demythologization of the Alps belongs to an older tradition 
dating at least back to the literary writings of Joseph Roth and Ödön 
von Horváth. This is followed by a series of case studies, starting with 
Jernej Habjan’s article on Pot (The Path) by Nejc Zaplotnik, a key text 
of Slovenian mountaineering literature and a characteristic example 
of a narrative built on the interplay between the literal search for the 
climbing route and the metaphorical search for meaning. A similar 
relation between a physical and a metaphysical adventure is at work in 
Mount Analogue (Le Mont Analogue, 1952), René Daumal’s unfinished 
novel about a group of mountaineers who set out to find an invis-
ible mountain, the Analogue; the genesis of the novel is provided by 
Martina Kopf. Kopf’s article is both preceded and followed by analyses 
of Polish mountaineering texts. The first one, by Przemysław Kaliszuk, 
sketches the development of the haptic sublime as the aesthetics that 
has helped Polish mountaineering writers to reconcile perceived lit-
erary conventions with the concreteness of the climbing experience. 
The second article, by Marek Pacukiewicz, adds to Kaliszuk’s focus on 
modernism a case study on contemporary Polish mountaineering lit-
erature, as it develops a Latourian reading of the final diary of one of 
the most accomplished climbers in the Himalaya, Jerzy Kukuczka.
Approaching mountaineering writings from the perspective of liter-
ary studies, the contributors are careful to cite them in their original 
languages, which they then also translate into the languages of their 
respective articles if they cannot provide published translations.
The editorial work on this cluster of essays has been funded by 
the Slovenian Research Agency in the framework of the research 
project Mountaineering Literature: Slovenia and Beyond (J6-1808) 
and the research program Studies in Literary History, Literary Theory 
and Methodology (P6-0024), both of which have been hosted at the 
ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies.
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Jernej Habjan :    Books and Mountains (An Introduction)
WORKS CITED
Simmel, Georg. “The Alpine Journey.” Trans. Sam Whimster. Theory, Culture & Society 
8.3 (1991): 95–98.
Barthes, Roland. “The Blue Guide.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. 74–77.
Veyne, Paul. “L’alpinisme: une invention de la bourgeoisie.” L’Histoire 11 (1979): 
41–49.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 
1992.
Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.