Mysterious Gear: Modernist Mountaineering, Oxygen Rigs, and the Politics of Breath

Garrington, Abbie

Abstract

One year after the Hillary/Tenzing ascent of Everest, W. H. Auden’s ‘Mountains’ (1954) describes climbers as ‘those unsmiling parties, / Clumping off at dawn in the gear of their mystery / For points up’. By this time, such gear was likely to include an oxygen rig. Attitudes to support of the human breath ‘on the hill’ in the early twentieth century were fractured and controversial. Oxygen-less attempts were associated with fairness and a sense of the sporting, as pushing the body to un-assisted limits on the highest peaks became entangled with notions of masculinity, in a post-Great War era when younger generations sought challenges that their elders had found through conflict. Auden’s gear might be one of ‘mystery’, but it also brought a jarring modernity into atavistic struggles between body and rock. Mountain literature pre-1953 registers the imperfect incorporation of oxygen supply ‘gear’ in a poetic context, and a breathed line, where it has not been present. The deployment of oxygen brought issues now associated with modernist culture onto the mountainside, while debates raged about who got to breathe the air of the Himalayas, and who—having deployed air-in-a-bottle—might not be said to have climbed them at all.

Citation

Garrington, A. (2021). Mysterious Gear: Modernist Mountaineering, Oxygen Rigs, and the Politics of Breath. In C. Saunders, D. Fuller, & J. Macnaughton (Eds.), The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary (391-408). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74443-4_19

• Online Publication Date: Oct 2, 2021
• Publication Date: Oct 5, 2021
• Deposit Date: Mar 11, 2019
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 391-408
• Book Title: The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary
• ISBN: 9783030744427
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74443-4_19
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1661353