2000 MMLA
SCE Session on "New Histories of Writing"

A Problem of the Personal: The Organization of Knowledge in the Alpine Club of London

Matthew Willen, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

When the news that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit of Mt. Everest on May 28, 1953 was broadcast over the loudspeakers along the coronation route of Queen Elizabethóa symbolic coincidence if ever there wasócrowds of Londoners cheered the British ascent of the worldís tallest mountain. Within hours, both the Queen and the Prime Minister had sent telegrams to the Everest base camp congratulating the team on its success. And within months, both Hillary and John Hunt, the expedition leader, were knighted for their service to the crown. The reception of the Everest ascent could not have been more different from the reception of the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, the last "great and inaccessible" peak in the Alps by a party led by British artisan, Edward Whymper. The news of this event, contrarily, was welcomed by a scathing critique of the practice of mountaineering in an editorial in the in the Times which asked of the enterprise, "But is it life? Is it duty? Is it common sense? Is it allowable? Is it not wrong?" (p. 9, July 27, 1865). These questions spurred a debate over the legitimacy of mountaineering in the pages of the Times which lasted for more than two months.

It is tempting to attribute the difference in reception of the events to the fact that on the descent from the summit of the Matterhorn the rope assuring the safety of the party broke and four members of the expedition fell to their deaths, including Lord Francis Douglas, a member of the British aristocracy. In contrast, the Everest ascent itself was generally without incident. Yet one needs to be cautious about such an explanation, which implies that had a similar event occurred on Everest there would have been a similar response. This, in fact, could not have been the case: by the time of the ascent of Everest enough incidents involving the loss of life and limb were part of the popular history of mountaineering that injuries and fatalities were certainly to be expected on an expedition of such magnitude. Alternately, then, it might be argued that the difference in reception of the events might be attributed to significance of ascent, that Everest is after all the tallest mountain in the world and, though striking in appearance, the Matterhorn is just another peak in the Alps. Yet this explanation fails to account for how the feat of ascending of the worldís tallest summit could come to be seen as a significantóespecially nationally significantóachievement (as if significance were something inherent or naturally occurring).

What is so striking about the difference in the reception of the two ascents is that the events surrounding the latter suggest that by 1953 the first four of the five questions posed by the editors of the Times 88 years prior had been answered in the affirmative. By the time Everest was ascended, mountain climbing was embraced as a legitimate pursuit and worthy of sacrificing oneís life for. This acceptance is not the simple effect of a increasingly tolerant popular attitude towards the exploits of individuals in the wilderness, but must be attributed to a history of writing about mountain climbing that struggled to represent the activity as an activity with national and imperial consequences and not simply some form of personally edifying experience. I would like to look here at a moment in that history of mountaineering, the history of its representation, to both consider how and why this association of the personal with the national was carried out. Specifically, I want to look at the organizationof the mountaineering narrative in the early years of the Alpine Journal, a periodical first published 1863 (and published continuously since) which served as the primary forum by which members of the recently formed Alpine Club of London disseminated knowledge relevant to the ascents of high mountains. Although not the first record of mountain ascents to appear in England nor the first documentation of the activities of members of the Alpine Club (an amateur society of generally middle-class males interested in the leisure time pursuit of climbing mountains), the personal narratives which fill the pages of Alpine Journal served as a means by which the legitimacy of mountaineering was initially argued to British society and effectively won. It thus provides us with one opportunity to see just how the ascent of a high mountain could come to be to viewed as a national achievement.

My point in demonstrating this form of association, however, has little to do with issues concerning the spread of nationalism or the history of mountaineering. Much has been written recently about the roles played by mountaineering specifically, the fields of travel and exploration more generally, and the organization of travel writing in the extension of British imperialism (see, for instance, Mary Louis Prattís Imperial Eyes, Peter H. Hansenís "The Invention of Mountaineering," David Spurrís The Rhetoric of Empire, and "Mountaineering and The British National Spirit," and J. R. Ellisís Vertical Margins). Instead, I am interested here in reflecting on the complex concept of the "personal," a concept whose influence Mariolina Salvatori has shown has been hotly debated but whose meaning is not necessarily agreed upon, and the problems and possibilities it presents to the organization of a field of knowledge ("The Personal as Recitation"). As I will demonstrate, the suppression of the "personal," the erasure of difference, was critical to the process by which climbing a mountain came to be viewed as nationally significant and the legitimacy of mountaineering as both leisure time pursuit and field of knowledge was argued. Yet, interestingly, I will also suggest that in another sense of term, the "personal" plays a critical role in the continued production and redefinition of this field of knowledge and the values around which it coheres. Although the terms and strategies relevant to the organization of this field are deployed in response to its own specific historical and social conditions, I want to suggest that the issues concerning the concept of the "personal" are similar to those that arise in other institutionalized forms of knowledge. My interests here are, in short, in the organization of a field of knowledge and the question of what a writer needs to do in order to participate in its production.

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That the contributions of their activities and interests to any sort of economic or social development were not obvious was not something which the members of Alpine Club of London were unaware. Although the publication of two volumes of narratives written by club members for the public entitled Peaks, Passes and Glaciers in 1858 and 1862 had the effect of Blackwoodís Edinburgh Magazine dubbing mountaineering "the new national past time," to many influential members of British society mountaineering was received as well as largely self-interested, a personal pursuit with no value other than aggrandizement for reaching the top of a high mountain. John Ruskin, for instance, declared that climbers looked upon the mountains as a "soaped pole in a bear garden" (Sesames and Lilies) and Charles Dickens argued that the sole advantage of mountain climbing was to allow one to "BRAG" ("Foreign Climbs"). One could say that Peaks, Passes and Glaciers did little to offset this interpretation; its narratives claimed for leisure time mountain exploration a wide array of motives and interests, ranging among the scientific, the aesthetic, the athletic, the antiquarian and the heroic. There was, in other words, no consensus among the writers about the good of mountaineering, suggesting that its benefits were individually defined. For the Alpine Club, an assessment of their endeavors as simply personal presented a key undesirable consequence: it would prohibit them from forming the club as an agency by which participants in its project could access a form of social authority. Consequently, when the club published the first edition of the Alpine Journal in 1863, the editors went to great pains to control the ways in which the contents of that publication and the activities to which they referred were received. Doing so involved constructing the project of mountaineering as field carried out by a type of a person whose interests and desires were consistent with national interests and concerns, especially, as Peter Hansen has explained, concerns with the current status of British masculinity and military fortitude.

This construction of the field and a type of person was carried out by two general strategies in the Alpine Journal. The first of these involved framing the readerís experience of the narratives in such a way as to demonstrate the relationship between the individual ascent and the progress of the nation. Framing of the readerís experience was accomplished primarily through three different methods: (1) through the layout and organization of the journal as a serial publication, (2) through the inclusion of an introductory address, (3) through the use of a carefully constructed opening narrative which suggested that the personal narratives of experiences in mountains included in the journal be read allegorically.

Interestingly, the Alpine Journal is organized around conventions of publication that are consistent with those employed in the production of contemporaneous scholarly and professional journals. Its volumes, for instance, are conventionally dated and numbered, consisting of bound editions with continuous pagination. Like most journals, its title page is headed by the title of the publication, the Alpine Journal, and in smaller typeface, the subtitle (A Record of Mountain Adventure and Scientific Observation), the name of the organization, the editorís name, dates and publication information. The contents pages display a systematic organization of articles and notices. The articles of greatest significance, the narratives of ascents and excursions written by club members, are listed first and in alphabetical order by the name of peak, region or other key word. The table of contents then lists the articles of lesser interest. The journal allocates an entire section to "Notes and Queries," which, as the "Introductory Address" to the first edition notes, was "open to all persons interested in the matters with which [the Club] concerns itself" (AJ1:2). This section is further subdivided with each subdivision listed alphabetically. These include "Alpine Byways" (short descriptions of mountain tours), "Letters to the Editor," "Miscellaneous" articles, "Short Narratives" on peaks and passes of lesser significance, "Queries" on different subjects, and a "Scientific" division. Both the heading of this section and the fact that these articles appear in the text in a smaller typeface than the main narratives are i ndicative of their lesser status.

While this organization of the Alpine Journal might appear largely innocent, simply a matter of publishing aesthetics, I want to suggest that these design conventions function as powerful rhetorical devices that allowed the club to be "imagined" as a community. I am alluding here to the work of Benedict Anderson who in his discussion of the role of print capitalism as one of the roots of nationalism has argued that such conventions of serial publication have provided readers with a sense of "fraternity," "solidarity" and a "deep horizontal comradeship" between individuals dispersed historically and geographically (Imagined Communities). Among other things, as Anderson has argued, these conventions work to construct the sense of a community by providing for an apprehension of the simultaneity of events, a confidence and an awareness that individuals dispersed historically and geographically are participating in a collective project that proceeds steadily and continuously through time. Moreover, this community might be characterized as a what Charles W. Anderson has called in his interesting work on the rhetoric of inquiry "the community of good practice." As Anderson notes, such rational communities provide "a background of relative stability--an infrastructure of settled meaning and dependable process--within the general atmosphere of transitoriness, flux, and change that characterizes the liberal polity" ("Human Sciences and the Liberal Polity" 348). The "community of good practice" is founded upon the participation of those who identify with it in a collective endeavor, who adhere to agreed upon rules of conduct and to disciplined ways of knowing and acting which ensure that the knowledge they produce is reliable, disciplined and efficiently accessible. The systematic organization of the Alpine Journal as represented by its table of contents, for instance, fulfills these requirements by demonstrating a consent to certain principles, rules of conduct and orders of significance. Its sections and alphabetical organization, moreover, demonstrate an efficiency of access of information. And the fact that the listing of primary articles, the narratives of ascents written by active club members, are arranged alphabetically by peak or region and not by author in no way attributes greater status to the achievement of any individual. Although credit is given where credit is due, the rules which govern the organization of this table of contents work to subordinate the personal pursuit to the collective endeavor by focusing on subjects of knowledge, not authors. The second method by which the editors of the Alpine Journal attempted to frame the readerís experience of the journal was through the inclusion of an anonymous "Introductory Address" at the beginning of the first volume. Just as the frontispiece and table of contents construct a community, the anonymity of the "Address" implies that it represents the collective interests of a coherent and homogeneous body rather than those of any particular individual. Functionally, the address served to introduce the journal and to define its project. It states, for instance, that the purpose of the Alpine Journal is to "generally, record all facts and incidents which it may be useful to the mountaineer to know," and to make this information readily accessible "to all the members of the Alpine Club, and to the public in general" (1). Rhetorically, however, these are important comments, for not only do they name the project of the journal, they name the Alpine Club member as a type of person, the mountaineer, and they figure this person as both distinguishable from and part of a common body called the public. This reference to the club member as a mountaineer should be read as an attempt to establish within British society a category of person to whom a particular form of knowledge is relevant and who as a producer of this knowledge is entitled, as persons are, to certain rights and privileges, certain forms of cultural capital that are associated with oneís status as legitimate form of being. This type of person is defined by an interest in a particular sort of object and desire to explore it. Specifically, this mountaineer is interested in the exploration and ascents of the tallest, most conspicuous, heavily glaciated and unclimbed peaks in a region, as both the peaks named as "first-rate" in the following passage and the illustrations included in the journal make clear.

From the perspective of one reading at the beginning of the 21st century, the concern that the Alps were nearly exhausted might seem rather surprising, for the development of new routes in the Alps has continued consistently over the past 135 years and still continues today (I will have more to say about this later). The notion that the Alps may soon become exhausted for a supply of narrative should not, however, be unfamiliar to readers of scientific travel writing from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which imagined the possibility of a descriptive project that could document the finitude of knowledge about the natural world. As this passage makes clear, the limits of this descriptive project are defined by a set of values concerning what sorts of objects are "great" or "first-rate," what sort of mountain is worth climbing and what is not of interest to the mountaineer. It is useful to note that this sort of conquest by ascent is figured as the destiny of the Englishman, for this is the key tropeóthe association of the project of mountaineering with the progress of the Anglo-Saxon raceóby which the Alpine Club gained established itself as a legitimate social agency.

The attempt to associate the project of mountaineering with the progress of England is perhaps no more obvious than in the carefully constructed account of an ascent of the Mt. Della Disgrazia in northern Italy, which immediately follows the "Introductory Address" in Volume I and serves as the third method by which the readerís experience of the Alpine Club project is framed. Written by club member, Edward Shirley Kennedy, "The Ascent of Mt. Della Disgrazia" carries out the process of associating the personal with the national allegorically. Through a careful construction of time in the essay that revolves around the figure of "a day," Kennedy allows, as Coleridge tells us about allegorical writing, one set of images and agents to display moral qualities and conceptions of the mind that are not readily explicit to the reader. In this manner, Kennedy figures an ascent of a single peak as recapitulating both the history of mountaineering and the history of travel and exploration (where the appearance of mountaineering on the scene is figured as a new day in that history). And in doing so, he argues for mountaineeringís complementary relationship to travel and exploration in its contribution to the destiny of England.

The piece begins with the bells of Campanile de Sondrio ringing in a new day (literally in the town of Morbegno and figuratively in the history of travel) marked by the appearance of five "belated" travelers (the Rev. Leslie Stephen and his trusty Oberland guide, Melchior Anderegg; Rev. Issac Taylor; Thomas Cox, an English servant; and Kennedy himself) after a "day" of travel that is figured as both adventurous, alluding to the maritime and continental feats of the great British explorers, as well as tedious, alluding to the common excursions associated with the Grand Tour of Europe.

Following this introduction of the travelers, Kennedy states the party's intentions for their visit to Sondrio:

The question is, of course, rhetorical. Just as the "Introductory Address" referred to the mountaineer as a type of person, Kennedy's question doesn't refer to a specific individual but to a particular category of being and asserts that that type of person is defined by particular set of desires. Here any of the personal interests and desires that an individual might possess (those of matters antiquarian or related to physical science) are subordinated to the collective desires of the mountaineer. This is not to say that such desires and interests are unimportant or illegitimate. On the contrary, Kennedy notes that they both claimed their due. Kennedy's comments, however, allude to the fact that while the interest in an unclimbed mountain and the desire to climb it that makes the project of mountaineering possible are preeminent here, in something of utopian fashion it is a project that allows for the expression and accommodation of a variety of interests, a trope that is deployed repeatedly throughout the narrative. Referring again to the allegorical sense of the narrative, if the ascent of this mountain accommodates individuals of varying interests and inclinations, it intimates that the history of travel and its contributions to the progress of the English race itself has been made possible by accommodating individuals with a variety of interests.

To extend the allegory, it is important to note that the mountaineers did not simply appear on the scene of the narrative, identify their peak and climb it. Like the history of travel and the history of mountain exploration, accomplishment of this expedition was achieved after several attempts and failures, much reconnoitering and much puzzlement. After Kennedy declares the party's intentions they depart Sondrio and head for the town of Chiesa, their base camp where they make arrangements at a local hotel and set outólike earlier explorers with very little knowledge of the terrainóto reconnoiter the mountain. They survey the terrain, select two possible routes and return to Chiesa for dinner and for a "council" to decide on the best plan of attack. The following day they make an attempt on the mountain only to discover that they had misjudged the height and distance of its actual summit. Upon the first encounter with the mountain, this party is bewildered by the peak they encounter. Note how in the following passage, the incident of the encounter is represented through the use of sentences that gradually increase in length while incorporating images straight from the discourse of the sublime (with its reference the combined elements of chaotic and glorious nature) to establish each new discovery as dazzling and demanding of greater reverance:

The point here is, in part, to establish the peak as a legitimate object of interest, by attributing to it value as high, glaciated and conspicuous, and unknown, all features that intrigue the mountaineer. The point is, as well, to demonstrate that what makes a successful ascent possible is a particular sensibility possessed by the mountaineer which doesnít (as many travelers to Alps were wont to do) simply relish in the reverential awe of nature, but which remembers the object of venturing out into nature as motivated by conquest. Mountaineering is not to be confused, in other words, with what was frequently referred to in Peaks, Passes and Glaciers as "ordinary travel," and the mountaineer no mere "ordinary traveller" who looks at the mountains and declares them glorious but inaccessible. His sensibility allows him to proceed in the face of the mountainsí gloom and glory and to ëmake conquestí. The achievements of the mountaineer are, in other words, to be thought of as being made by a the same sensibility possessed by other great achievements in exploration. And this association becomes the key to arguing for the contribution of mountain climbing to the progress of the nation, for it is the declared ability of mountaineering to develop a sensibility that remains steadfast in the face of doubt and difficulty that makes greater national accomplishments possible, a point demonstrated repeatedly in this account.

The account of the actual ascent, for instance, is told as what more than one climber has called, "that well-told story of perseverance crowned by success." Ultimately in the face of a peak of such expanse, one farther off than anticipated, the party settles for the ascent of a lesser summit from which they are able to reconnoiter the rest of the mountain. They retreat in failure, suffer an accident on the descent (which itself offers these mountaineers knowledge concerning proper rope technique, one they employ later), and return to the hotel. After a number of days of rest, they return withmore certain knowledge and are able to make a successful ascent. Here, Kennedy makes quite a "day" out of the day the actual ascent, which again reminds the reader of the allegorical quality of the narrative. After passing part of the night at the hotel, in Morbegno now, the party (sans Taylor who found making observations more desirable than climbing the mountain and who thus does not get to participate in the glory of the accomplishment) departs at "ten minutes before one in the morning" for the della Disgrazia. They go only a little distance and are turned back on account of rain. They return to Morbegno, finish the night, have breakfast at "about ten oíclock" and make an exploration of the mountain path towards the della Disgrazia during the day. They dine, sleep, and are up again and once more en route to the mountain at "twenty minutes before midnight." They make the ascent the following day, which is characterized as a progression from one bit of difficulty to another. Upon reaching the summit, Kennedy constructs a scene in which the utopian vision of mountaineering is ultimately realized:

Invoking the various traditions carried out by different mountain climbers upon reaching the summit of a peakórelishing in a view, smoking a pipe, pocketing the highest stone, taking scientific measurementsóKennedy intimates that success is ultimately made possible by the pursuit of individuals who value an expedition and what it has to offer for any number of reasons. Kennedy is able to assert the preeminence of his view of the ascent, the exhilarating consciousness of difficulty overcome, by virtue of a dissertation on how "this effect and the results to which it gives rise form an answer more than sufficient to refute the insinuations of those who say that these excursions are without aim or purpose; that those who undertake them do so solely for the purpose of saying they have been to the top of a high mountain" (19). That answer is that mountaineering provides for "two distinct effects of bodily and mental culture:" the development of a physical aptitude as well as the excitement of a "thoughtful foresight," "self-reliance," and "a fertility in resource when difficulties are impending" (19). Thus, Kennedy finds himself "justified in claiming for Alpine climbing the first rank among athletic sports, as the nourisher of those varied elements that go to form all that is commendable in the constitution of the Anglo-Saxon character" (20). Again, Kennedy does not make the claim that mountaineering can contribute to the progress of the nation in the same way that imperial pursuits can. He canít; one canít make the argument that mountain climbing will afford some economic gain. Instead, the development of bodily and mental culture through both a physical exercise and the exercise of a sensibility that successful mountaineering demands, for whatever personal reason it is pursued, is figured as developing those qualities that make it possible for England to carry out its destiny. The positioning of this narrative, as the first narrative in the first edition of the Alpine Journal, consequently suggests that the narratives which follow be read not simply as accounts of personally edifying experiences, but as accounts of the pursuits carried out by a type of person who is performing a sort of duty.

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The second strategy by which the Alpine Journal works to construct a field of knowledge and characteristic figure who interests were consistent with national issues was through systematic production of narratives which repressed personal ways of attributing value to mountain climbing and greatly restricted the meaning one might attribute to an excursion. The effect here is to construe a discursive identity whose motives and concerns are consistent with the declared project of the club. To be certain, the narratives that appear in the Alpine Journal are not belletristic accounts of excursions in the wilderness such as we see in American nature writing, a genre of writing about personal experiences in nature which, as Joseph Wood Krutch has explained in his seminal study of the genre, Great American Nature Writing, celebrates the "highly personal expression" of a sympathetic sort of sensibility towards nature. Both in terms of type of information provided and mode of narration, Alpine Journal narratives appear strikingly homogeneous. To sit and read through several volumes of the Alpine Journal one might get the distinct impression that he or she is reading the same thing over and over again. The names, events and places change, but the manner in which those names, events and places are represented remains strikingly consistent. This homogeneity is a critical aspect of presenting the activities of club members as a part of a collective project, for it restricts the meaning that can be attributed to a mountaineering excursion; there is little place in these narratives for paying attention to things that strike the individual fancy or for personal expression. The narratives included in the Alpine Journal should be thus read as statements that work to document the way the mountaineeróa figure that is interested in certain sorts of information and that evaluates what he sees in a consistent fashionóexperiences a particular excursion and not the way an individual experiences it. This form of experience is organized in a way that provides information relevant to constructing the historical record of the club and to assisting others who are interested in climbing a particular mountain or following a particular route of ascent.

I have found it useful to identify five features of the mountaineerís way of experiencing or knowing a region that form the expectations of the mountaineering narrative:

The extent to which these expectations are addressed depends largely upon the degree to which a writer can assume common knowledge about these different types of information, for oneís status as a mountaineer depends in part on possessing a body of knowledge assumed to be common. The opening passages of the narratives tend to be telling of this stipulation. Accounts of ascents and excursions in well-known regions, for example, tend to assume the reader will be familiar with a great deal of information. The following, for example, is rather characteristic opening passage from an Alpine Journal narrative. Written by Thomas S. Kennedy (no relation to Edward S. Kennedy), an engineer from London, about his first ascent of the Dent Blanche, a prominent peak in the Swiss Alps, it appears in the first edition:

Here, Kennedy provides information "for the record." He states what he is going to climb, how he is going to climb it, who he is going to climb it with, what the conditions were, when it took place and generally what route will be followed. The passage also assumes quite a bit of knowledge on part of its readers. It assumes, for instance, that its readers possess some knowledge about the Dent Blanche, what makes it an attractive object of interest, and particularly that it was unascended; it assumes that its readers are familiar with Peter Taugwalder and his qualifications as a guide; it also assumes that the reader knows something about Abricolla, its accommodations, and the route to there from Zermatt over the Col díErin and that both are in Switzerland. And this is because in 1863, members of the Alpine Clubómost of whom could be assumed to have climbed in Switzerlandówere quite familiar with the mountains of and travel in the Swiss Alps either by first-hand knowledge acquired through travel and/or through reading about mountaineering in the Swiss Alps. To describe these things in detail, highlighting their attractions, their qualifications, their locations and routes, would be both redundant and inappropriate, rendering questionable Kennedyís status in this community. The writerís job in this sort of narrative, then, is to provide the relevant information for the record and to enter directly into an account of the ascent.

Not all of the narratives that appear in the Alpine Journal, though, recount ascents of peaks in the Alps. Considering that the declared project of the clubwas to climb all of the "first-rate" peaks in Europe and in all the distant ranges of the world, narratives which describe expeditions (reconnaissance or climbing) to regions whose mountaineering potentials were little known appear quite frequently, even in the earliest editions of the journal. In these cases, a writer has to provide a rationale for visiting a region, an explanation for why he did what he did. The expedition narrative thus functions to record observations of a region made by "the first" mountaineer and to identify the possibilities the region holds for future mountaineering pursuits. Here, for example is the opening passage to John Ormsbyís "The Sierra Nevada," a narrative about his exploratory expedition to a little known (in 1867) range in Spain:

The invocation of Blackburn, a travel narrative and the Alpine Journal announcement that open this passage establish the possibility for mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada and authorize Ormsbyís excursion to the region. The specific information provided by each of these, especially the reference to elevation, makes it possible for Ormsby to think mountaineering because such an elevation suggests that the peaks surely must possess a key Alpine qualityóglaciers. This is important, for the success of such a reconnaissance expedition as a subject for an Alpine Journal essay rests on the degree to which one is able to locate peaks that possess the club's criteria for interest, using the Alps as the standard by which a region or peak may be evaluated. That is to say, the interest of a region is assessed by the degree to which it possesses (or can be assumed to possess) Alpine qualities.

This convention of evaluating the terrain on the basis of Alpine standards is a common feature of the expedition account and is a critical facet of knowing a region as a mountaineer. It appears again and again in Ormsbyís narrative. During the course of his narrative, for instance, Ormsby will visit the towns of Granada and Lanjaron, both known locations written up in travel narratives like Blackburnís. Unlike other travelers, he elaborates his experience of the villages on the basis of values assumed to be characteristic to mountaineers. Upon reaching Granada, he will note that given the status of the Sierra Nevada as the second highest mountain range in Europe one would expect to see "a lofty chain of mountains covered with dazzling snow stretching far away east and west" (3:4). In other words, one would expect to see another Chamonix or Zermatt. "What you do see," he explains, "looks rather like one big brownish-grey mountain, with a sharp culminating peak that does not seem to be half as far off or half as high as it ought to be." "Ought to be" is a key phrase here; it is indicative of the fact that the terrain is being evaluated with regard to a standard or norm for mountain ranges. The central Alps are that standard. As a mountaineer, who anticipates a view like one gets in Chamonix, Ormsby is obviously disappointed.

For the writer of such a narrative, much attention is often given over to documenting the approach to a peak and/or a region, evaluating encounters with reference to the interests of the mountaineer. Conventionally, this form of experience entails, not surprisingly, describing the region and its peaks for the promise they hold for future mountaineering exploits. It also, though, involves naming towns and villages visited and evaluating them with respect to the availability (or lack thereof) of accommodations and supplies; naming and evaluating the abilities of local people who might be used as guides; identifying and evaluating roads for access, terrain for its interest and beauty. Ormsbyís comments on the village of Lanjaron are illustrative:

Here the shift from knowing the oranges as a feature of one of the very loveliest spots to knowing them as "an admirable provision of nature for the comfort of the mountaineer in this fierce thirsty land" is really quite striking. It illustrates quite clearly how Ormsby is aware that evaluations of the village from the perspective of a traveler who admires its beauty have little place in a narrative about mountaineering. In addition to oranges as provisions, we see other things evaluated with reference to the interests of mountaineers: a "clean and comfortable inn" and an efficient guide whose Spanish name may be converted to English. Estévez becomes Stephen, "a name entirely calculated to inspire confidence on a mountain expedition." The allusion is to the well-known member of the Alpine Club, Leslie Stephen. Ormsby will go on to note that, "He is a thoroughly willing, good-humoured youth, strong, active, ready to walk any number of hours, afraid of nothing, and rather fond than otherwise of camping out." These are the sorts of ideal traits one might attribute to a true mountaineer and which Stephen himself was thought to possess.

Certainly a definitive feature of the mountaineerís experience is the sort of language he employs to construct a terrain as interesting or lacking interest. Being a mountaineer, Ormsby will not simply visit a couple of villages in Spain, he will also climb a few mountains, specifically Picacho de la Veleta, Mulahacen and Cerro de Caballo. From the summits of each he will describe profiles of the other peaks of the region and the general lay of the land in order to document the value of the achievement. In the following passage, Ormsby describes the scene from the summit of Mulahacen as he looks down upon the Canon de la Veleta, a deep canyon that forms a cirque beneath the three summits he ascends. He finds this canyon so impressive that he spends a great deal of time describing it:

Again, we see the invocation of a peak in the Alps, the Wetterhorn, as a point of reference for an qualitative evaluation. We also see the invocation of the words of the "gushing school" which locates the mountaineerís way of knowing in opposition to a way of knowing characteristic to non-exploratory travel narratives. And significantly, we see here not a picturesque or even sublime landscape, but a geologic landscape complete with jumbles of rocks, mountains, glaciers and precipices dispersed spatially in a scene that is constructed by attention to heights, distances, geographical orientations. These nouns and associated adjectives are all features of a mountaineerís vernacular that appears repeatedly in all mountaineering narratives. One can add to the list terms such as crevasse, serac, gendarme, couloir, slope, col and pass, among many others. They refer to the sorts of objects that excite a mountaineerís desire. Ormsby himself will note, for example, "I was so taken by the mystery of [the Corrál de la Veleta] that I was determined when I returned to Granada, from which side it was obviously more easily approached, to devote a day to exploring its recesses" (3:12-13).

As well as documenting what one sees, of course a significant aspect of writing about any expedition, to the Alps or elsewhere, is describing the actual ascent. Not surprisingly, the most prominent mode of narration is that which attends to the difficulties or obstacles presented to a mountaineerís progress on the ascent. Writers frequently employ the Alpine vernacular as well as an image repertoire to paint a heroic landscape in which the human presence shrinks into insignificance, often figuring the ascent as a battle with the savage forces of nature. Here, for instance, is another example from T.S. Kennedyís "Ascent of the Dent Blanche," that describes the traverse of a particular passage on the mountain. The route is constructed as a passage through a wild landscape, a bastion of turrets, towers and ruins, and peopled by the wild forces of nature.

While rather rich in images that construct the landscape as "weird and terrible," this passage is more than just an aesthetic gloss. It is richly empirical in its movement from landmark to landmark. Like all Alpine Journal narratives of ascents of peaks, this passage is organized around progression from one verifiable location to another, accompanied by a description of the route, how it was traversed and its significant features. The passage begins at a place that can be located by other travelers, the base of smooth rock slab, the passage of which presents difficulties and threatens success, and progresses to another identifiable feature, a "second huge and tottering ruin" that is accessed by crawling along the ridge.

This mode of narration, this narrative of the difficult ascent, can easily be read as essentially masculinist in its impulses. And, as I noted earlier, given the self-consciousness about the status of British masculinity, this reading was desirable, contributing the sense that the project of the club did indeed serve some form of social good. It can also be read two other ways though. On the one hand, it can be seen as form of egotistical self-aggrandizement, and one might say that the editors of the Times read it in this light given the skepticism they voiced in response to the Matterhorn incident. It also may be read as a mode of narration that functions to make possible a certain form of practice by communicating to future travelers information about a route that they can anticipate and prepare for. The editors of the Alpine Journal were well-aware that the discourse that they believed to be of most use to others interested in climbing mountains was easily read as self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement. And their efforts at organizing the Alpine Journal attempted to keep the narratives from being read that way.

I have often been asked about the point of paying such attention to this body of material. There are several issues at stake here. Aside from calling our attention to some of the issues that have necessitated the delimitation of ways of knowing and the repression of the personal in the organization of this field, which may be reflective of similar issues in other fields (not an insignificant matter in itself), I am interested in demonstrating some of the pedagogical possibilities afforded by various traditions of writing about personal experience. For several good reasons concerning the question of how to make use of students experience rather than treat it as unimportant, it has become conventional in the instruction of undergraduate writing to rely extensively on writing about personal experience as a pedagogical tool. Conventionally, however, the pedagogical use of personal writing has relied extensively on a single tradition of writing about personal experience, namely the belletristic essay. In recent years, strong arguments have been made on behalf of the personal essay, particularly as it allows one to transgress the problems posed by academic writing, which in its reliance on convention and fairly rigorous and discipline-specific ways of knowing is conventionally figure as hostile to the personal, the ways of making meaning that students (and professionals) bring to any situation. In another piece I have written recently, I argued that while there are certainly benefits to the belletristic essay, it is however rather inefficient in helping students to understand what is at stake in producing academic forms of knowledge and with helping them to understand what it might mean to write in a highly convention driven, disciplined and systematic form of discourse. I would say that the mountaineering narrative and the tradition of writing that it participates in can be very effective to serving these ends. One of the interesting things about these narratives is that they bear qualities that are similar to what might be broadly classified as academic knowledge. We see, for instance, many of the same rhetorical strategies for establishing authority being deployed in the Alpine Journal narrative, with its construction of the writer as a type of person, with its intensive reliance on formulae, method and convention, and with its rigorous methods of evaluation and its intensive repression of personal ways of knowing, as we see in many forms of scholarly discourse. Yet, unlike scholarly forms of knowledge, the ability to produce this knowledge requires little in the way of specialized training, with the exception of an understanding of a mountaineeringís common knowledge. It is, after all, a form of knowledge that is produced by self-proclaimed amateurs. In this sense, I would say that this sort of narrative is more effective than the use of nature writing, which has had a long standing presence in composition textbooks due to its emphasis on the expression of the personal and resistance to institutionalized ways of knowing.

Many will undoubtedly argue the importance of allowing for the expression of the personal. That, as Kurt Spellmeyer and a host of others have argued in recent years, without providing the opportunity to make meaning as it relates to their own experience, students will never develop the interest and commitment necessary to participate in the projects of scholarly communities. Moreover, as the argument goes, without making a place for the personal I desire to support the status quo, to leave academic knowledge unproblematized, allowing for the expression of a limited forms of experience. To this argument, I would say first that I am not opposed to using expressive writing except as an end unto itself. It seems a useful exercise for allowing students to see what is made possible and what is prohibited by different traditions of writing. I would say second, however, that the expression of personal experience is not the only way to problematize a field of knowledge. There is a sense which "the personal" plays a particularly powerful role in the organization of any field. I am, however, referring to the personal not as the idiosyncratic ways of knowing and making meaning that a person possesses, but as an individualís proclivities or inclinations to do one thing instead of another, to take a certain type of vacation during holiday, to study one author rather than another, to ask one set of questions rather than another. These inclinations are central to the production of knowledge in any fieldóthey are why we donít all choose to do and study the same thing. And this sense of the personal, I would argue, plays the important role of revising and transforming the values and interests around which a community coheres. I would like to close this paper by looking at how this sense of the personal has worked in the field of mountaineering to sustain the Clubís endeavors as the Alps became "exhausted" by working to redefine the values around which the Alpine Club community cohered. I believe this will help to clarify the significance of helping student to learn what is at stake in the production of convention driven discourses and how convention may be used in the service of "the personal."

* * * * *

It is useful to recall that the "Introductory Address" imagined the project of mountaineering as culminating in the ascents of the worldís tallest, glaciated and most conspicuous peaks. As I stated, this objective is formulated around a set of values which figures a particular type of ascent as legitimate fodder for the journal mill. Ultimately, this is a finite project. And as the "Introductory Address" to the Alpine Journal indicated, the Alpine Club was quite aware that the "exhaustion" of the Alps was thus inevitable. There are only so many big, conspicuous and glaciated unclimbed peaks in the central Alps, and, with the ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, that region had for all intents and purposes become "exhausted" of the sort of peak with which the Alpine Club was assumed to be collectively interested. It is not at all surprising, then, that comments like C.G. Heathcoteís above should very early in the history of the Alpine Journal become quite commonplace. While this passage on the one hand, demonstrates the difficulty mountaineers had in finding legitimate objects of interest to pursue in the Alps as early as 1867, it also demonstrates a preference for a particular type of mountaineering. To many members of the club, the idea of turning to the distant ranges of the world to pursue first ascents was neither practical nor desirable. Expeditions to distant mountainous regions were both expensive and time consuming and not every member of the clubóin fact, very fewóhad either the time or the financial resources to make for North America, South America, eastern Europe, the Himalaya, much less the outlying corners of the Alps. Nor did many of them have the desire to pursue the sort of mountaineering that expeditions offered. Heathcoteís comments about a quality route beginning and ending in a hotel are telling, for they certainly are not indicative of a taste that is consistent with those necessary for excursions to distant regions. Such expeditions required a certain bend of character that allowed one to take pleasure from bad travel conditions, uncertain lodging and accommodations and unmapped terrain, all of which often left very little time for actual mountain climbing. The Alpine Clubís constituency consisted largely of professional men who had careers which allowed them the leisure to travel to the Alps on holiday, but not necessarily throughout Europe and the world. That is to say that big, complex expeditions offered the promise of a sort of mountaineering that many members of the club didnít find particularly appealing. Consequently, many club members chose to focus their pursuits around climbing activities in the Alps.

This choice to continuing climbing in the Alps, however, raises a rather sticky question: If the Alps were exhausted of the sorts of objects and excursions that the club was interested in, what legitimate place had narratives of their ascents in the Alpine Journal? Given the clubís project, the Alpine Journal could have simply become an organ for representing expeditionary excursions to regions distant from the Alps. Yet there are often as many, if not more, narratives of ascents in the Alps that appear in its pages. In a strong sense, the Alpine Club needed to allow access to its journal to those who climbed in the Alps. If the journal revolved exclusively around the activity of exploring distant regions and ascending their highest and glaciated peaks, the Alpine Club would run the risk of becoming a small elitist organization catering only to those who had the time, money and inclination to travel afar. Mostly, the constituency of the club did not desire or was able to participate in the conquering of the highest summits of the ranges distant from the Alps. By the same token, many who climbed in the Alps enjoyed making first ascentsóone could argue, as many did in later years, that making a first ascent was perhaps more important than the peak that it was made on. With the Alps "exhausted," a redefinition of the values around which the Alpine Club community cohered became necessary to make a place for the sorts of excursions that many desired to pursue. Redefining those values allowed for a broader access to the Alpine Journal which provided a variety of individuals with access to a form of cultural capital that otherwise would have been unattainable. Writing of an ascent of a "second rate" or "second class" peak, an object of questionable interest, indeed, served to authorize the decision to pursue that excursion and attributed to the person writing a particular form of status or authority. Equally as important, it made it possible and legitimate to think the possibility of such excursions on similar objects.

Because of the questionable continuity of "second rate" or "second class" peaks with the clubís project, when writing of ascents of these peaks writers faced the rhetorical task of construing the interest and legitimacy of these excursions. This was often an awkward task, for it demanded attributing Alpine qualities to a peak that was already in the Alps; that is to say, it involved attributing the qualities of the "great peaks" to a lesser peak. A. Adams Reillyís early narrative of his ascent of "The Bec de Luseny" offers a fine example of this strategy. He begins by acknowledging that the interest of the Bec de Luseny is questionable but goes on to attribute to the peak qualities assumed to be of collective interest to mountaineers through the use of adjectives commonly associated with objects of interest. He opens by noting that his peak is only "second rate," possessing "no great elevation, indeed, but [it is] the highest as well as the most beautiful of this group" (3:49 my emphasis). The ascent only takes him a short while (he is on the summit by 9:30 a.m.), but he notes that it is a nice and occasionally difficult climb. In turn, the closing statement (the place in the narrative where one conventionally makes recommendations to future mountaineers) comes to operate in correlation with the opening the statement: the opening remarks authorize the individualís choice of a certain sort of object and the closing comments attempt to cast such objects as worthy of collective attention. Reilly argues in the end that second rate peaks have something very useful to offer:

The second class peak is, for Reilly, obviously not the real thing; he assumes mountaineers are ultimately interested in other sorts of big peaks in the highest ranges. The second class peak though provides practice in the skills necessary for the real thing.

For othersómany othersóexcursions on objects of questionable interest were very much the real thing. One of the most striking examples (for the way it opened the possibility of climbing a wholly different sort of peak) of an individual taking the object of questionable interest for the real thing was Clinton Dentíspassion for the Aiguille du Dru, near Chamonix. An avid mountaineer, Dentís career as a surgeon and as an examiner in surgery at Cambridge afforded him the means for mountaineering (he later became president of the club and one of the foremost mountaineers in the Caucasus region). A good thing too, because it took him no less than eighteen attempts over a six year period (1873-1879) to succeed in ascending the Dru. His is the archetypal story of perseverance crowned by success. Beginning with his 1874 narrative on "Two Attempts on the Aiguille du Dru" (7:65-7), the tale ends in 1879 with another narrative, "A History of an Ascent of the Dru" (9:185-200). While the second narrative is the culminating piece, the first is extraordinary for doing two important things: it tells the story of an unsuccessful ascent in the Alps (which as Dent notes is "an unparalleled thing. . . going against all precedent"[7:65]) and produces the Dru as a legitimate object of interest. The effect is to make possible both the presence of other narratives of attempts and the ascents of mountains of a similar character.

Speaking from the perspective of a modern mountaineer, it is difficult to imagine how the Dru might not be considered an object of interest to mountaineers; it is an ominous and conspicuous mountain which, with its enormous granite walls, is the sort of peak that tends to make the modern climberís palms sweat. But because it is a big rock lacking the requisite glaciers, it was not the sort of thing that most mountaineers were interested in around 1874. Like Reilly, Dent authorizes his decision to ascend an object of questionable interest first by addressing the qualities that might make its interest questionable to his colleagues. This is an extremely important move for situating himself within the Alpine Club community because it demonstrates that the writer is quite aware of the values and of the collective issues with which a community is assumed to be concerned. Dent is well-versed in the field of mountaineering. Consequently, he is prepared to address possible objections and begins by constructing the interest of the Dru in a truly memorable passage:

There are two possible objections to his decision to climb the Dru that Dent entertains here, and he addresses them in such a way as to present the Dru as something which demands respect, particularly from mountaineers. First, he anticipates objections to the Dru as a significant peak on the basis of its height, "12,517 feet only," which he promptly responds to by pointing to another important quality of the peak: it may not be tall, but it is conspicuous. Moreover, it is threateningly conspicuous, with its "vast dark precipices on the north face, with its long lines of cliff, broken and jagged, and sparsely wrinkled with gullies, free from a patch or trace of snow," frowning down on the people at the Montanvert (a tourist haunt at the end of the tram above Chamonix), who treat the peak with indignity, photographing it, painting it, gawking at it. The passage is steeped with the mountaineerís vernacular that we have seen in other narratives. The point is very clear: Dent wants to stress that the peak has not been, in the words of more than one mountaineer, "properly consecrated;" it is worthy of a mountaineerís respect. Second, Dent responds to the often made insinuations that the Dru is nothing more than pinnacle on a ridge. Again his response is that it needs to be treated with more respect. It is not simply a tooth of rock on a ridge but, using quite a wild image, "a canine tooth in a gigantic carnivorous jaw." Moreover, it has another quality of a significant peak. It is a peak in and of itself; it just depends on where you look at it from. The final image of the passage with its analogy of learning Latin and the relationship between respect and being beaten, figures such desire as natural and again alludes to the notion that the difficulty of ascent contributes to the development of "culture," a term employed by E.S. Kennedy.

It becomes clear, however, that Dent is not too far out of line with his desire. Like Ormsby, Dent is able to situate his decision to attempt an ascent historically. The Dru has attracted the interests of other mountaineers, namely E.S. Kennedy and R. Pendlebury, the latter of whom furnished notes on an attempt that Dent discusses at length. The lengthy description of Pendleburyís unpublished account should not seem at all surprising. Given the historical emphasis of the Alpine Club project, it is Dentís responsibility to provide any and all information on the (mountaineering) history of the peak. Similarly, in the later narrative, he will open with another description of an ascent that may have preceded his own undertaken by than J.D. Forbes, a prominent scientific explorer of the mid-nineteenth century who wrote extensively about the Alps and is commonly invoked in order to authorize a questionable object of interest. Although a narrative of his attempt was published in the French Annuaire for 1878, "owing to an absence of detail," Dent suggests that the account "may legitimately be questioned and criticised" (9:186-187).

In the long run, Dent will suffer the same fate--twice--as his predecessors on the Dru. He is defeated on the mountain not by time or weather (although on the first attempt these become factors) or incompetence, but by "sheer difficulty." It is on the basis of this difficulty and the challenges it provides that Dent maintains the construction of the mountain as an object demanding of respect. The first attempt, for instance, involves a conundrum of just getting to the mountain. Departing at one in the morning from Chamonix, they hike up towards the Dru noticing that, unlike most of the big conspicuous peaks, the closer they get the more difficult it is to discern. Deciding on the peak, they have difficulty selecting the proper route of ascent. Having selected the route, getting to the base becomes a nightmare because they have to cross a "preposterous glacier," with "a longitudinal bergschrund running up its whole length, instead of the normal transverse crack," and this feature "vexed [them] hugely." Vexed is indicative of the response of the party to the various difficulties which the mountain presents, difficulties which time and again culminate in the impossibility to ascend any further, forcing them repeatedly to descend or turn back in order to try a new way. The difficulties they encounter on this peak are, then, of no ordinary order. They consist not of the repetitive motion of cutting steps up a long snow slope, or the simple following of a ridge. Nor do they pose the sort of difficulty where, as was the case with T.S. Kennedyís narrative earlier in the chapter, one can simply crawl along a ridge or brave the threatening elements of nature. They are difficulties which require a sort of problem solving, where the mountain is figured as a puzzle one has to crack:

Like narratives about ascents of first rate objects of interest, this attends to difficulties which are posed by distinct features of a route. Unlike big snowy mountains, however, the route to the tops of this type of peak is not obvious (one canít simply follow a ridge, couloir or snow slope). The difference with this narrative is that we see multiple possibilities for overcoming difficulties: either get a ladder (which he ultimately does on the successful ascent) or try another course of action.

Ultimately, it is both a class of object and this problem-solving activity provided by the object that Dent attempts to justify as a matters of collective interest to the club. Dent will close his narrative with an intensely rhetorical passage which does nothing less than establish the legitimacy of the pursuits he advocates by identifying them with the pursuits of the founders of the club. Note, however, how he stresses a difference between the past and present:

I admire this passage for the way it draws on the past to look forward, noting the transformation of values that is redefining the object of the Alpine Club and realizing that the changes that take place are at once unfathomable but inevitable. Again, I would say such a transformation is necessary in any field, in part to redefine the values of a community to make place for historical change as well as to make possible a place for the interests of individuals who choose to identify with a community.

Works cited

A Problem of the Personal: The Organization of Knowledge in the Alpine Club of London

Matthew Willen, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

When the news that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit of Mt. Everest on May 28, 1953 was broadcast over the loudspeakers along the coronation route of Queen Elizabethóa symbolic coincidence if ever there wasócrowds of Londoners cheered the British ascent of the worldís tallest mountain. Within hours, both the Queen and the Prime Minister had sent telegrams to the Everest base camp congratulating the team on its success. And within months, both Hillary and John Hunt, the expedition leader, were knighted for their service to the crown. The reception of the Everest ascent could not have been more different from the reception of the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, the last "great and inaccessible" peak in the Alps by a party led by British artisan, Edward Whymper. The news of this event, contrarily, was welcomed by a scathing critique of the practice of mountaineering in an editorial in the in the Times which asked of the enterprise, "But is it life? Is it duty? Is it common sense? Is it allowable? Is it not wrong?" (p. 9, July 27, 1865). These questions spurred a debate over the legitimacy of mountaineering in the pages of the Times which lasted for more than two months.

It is tempting to attribute the difference in reception of the events to the fact that on the descent from the summit of the Matterhorn the rope assuring the safety of the party broke and four members of the expedition fell to their deaths, including Lord Francis Douglas, a member of the British aristocracy. In contrast, the Everest ascent itself was generally without incident. Yet one needs to be cautious about such an explanation, which implies that had a similar event occurred on Everest there would have been a similar response. This, in fact, could not have been the case: by the time of the ascent of Everest enough incidents involving the loss of life and limb were part of the popular history of mountaineering that injuries and fatalities were certainly to be expected on an expedition of such magnitude. Alternately, then, it might be argued that the difference in reception of the events might be attributed to significance of ascent, that Everest is after all the tallest mountain in the world and, though striking in appearance, the Matterhorn is just another peak in the Alps. Yet this explanation fails to account for how the feat of ascending of the worldís tallest summit could come to be seen as a significantóespecially nationally significantóachievement (as if significance were something inherent or naturally occurring).

What is so striking about the difference in the reception of the two ascents is that the events surrounding the latter suggest that by 1953 the first four of the five questions posed by the editors of the Times 88 years prior had been answered in the affirmative. By the time Everest was ascended, mountain climbing was embraced as a legitimate pursuit and worthy of sacrificing oneís life for. This acceptance is not the simple effect of a increasingly tolerant popular attitude towards the exploits of individuals in the wilderness, but must be attributed to a history of writing about mountain climbing that struggled to represent the activity as an activity with national and imperial consequences and not simply some form of personally edifying experience. I would like to look here at a moment in that history of mountaineering, the history of its representation, to both consider how and why this association of the personal with the national was carried out. Specifically, I want to look at the organizationof the mountaineering narrative in the early years of the Alpine Journal, a periodical first published 1863 (and published continuously since) which served as the primary forum by which members of the recently formed Alpine Club of London disseminated knowledge relevant to the ascents of high mountains. Although not the first record of mountain ascents to appear in England nor the first documentation of the activities of members of the Alpine Club (an amateur society of generally middle-class males interested in the leisure time pursuit of climbing mountains), the personal narratives which fill the pages of Alpine Journal served as a means by which the legitimacy of mountaineering was initially argued to British society and effectively won. It thus provides us with one opportunity to see just how the ascent of a high mountain could come to be to viewed as a national achievement.

My point in demonstrating this form of association, however, has little to do with issues concerning the spread of nationalism or the history of mountaineering. Much has been written recently about the roles played by mountaineering specifically, the fields of travel and exploration more generally, and the organization of travel writing in the extension of British imperialism (see, for instance, Mary Louis Prattís Imperial Eyes, Peter H. Hansenís "The Invention of Mountaineering," David Spurrís The Rhetoric of Empire, and "Mountaineering and The British National Spirit," and J. R. Ellisís Vertical Margins). Instead, I am interested here in reflecting on the complex concept of the "personal," a concept whose influence Mariolina Salvatori has shown has been hotly debated but whose meaning is not necessarily agreed upon, and the problems and possibilities it presents to the organization of a field of knowledge ("The Personal as Recitation"). As I will demonstrate, the suppression of the "personal," the erasure of difference, was critical to the process by which climbing a mountain came to be viewed as nationally significant and the legitimacy of mountaineering as both leisure time pursuit and field of knowledge was argued. Yet, interestingly, I will also suggest that in another sense of term, the "personal" plays a critical role in the continued production and redefinition of this field of knowledge and the values around which it coheres. Although the terms and strategies relevant to the organization of this field are deployed in response to its own specific historical and social conditions, I want to suggest that the issues concerning the concept of the "personal" are similar to those that arise in other institutionalized forms of knowledge. My interests here are, in short, in the organization of a field of knowledge and the question of what a writer needs to do in order to participate in its production.

* * * * * *

That the contributions of their activities and interests to any sort of economic or social development were not obvious was not something which the members of Alpine Club of London were unaware. Although the publication of two volumes of narratives written by club members for the public entitled Peaks, Passes and Glaciers in 1858 and 1862 had the effect of Blackwoodís Edinburgh Magazine dubbing mountaineering "the new national past time," to many influential members of British society mountaineering was received as well as largely self-interested, a personal pursuit with no value other than aggrandizement for reaching the top of a high mountain. John Ruskin, for instance, declared that climbers looked upon the mountains as a "soaped pole in a bear garden" (Sesames and Lilies) and Charles Dickens argued that the sole advantage of mountain climbing was to allow one to "BRAG" ("Foreign Climbs"). One could say that Peaks, Passes and Glaciers did little to offset this interpretation; its narratives claimed for leisure time mountain exploration a wide array of motives and interests, ranging among the scientific, the aesthetic, the athletic, the antiquarian and the heroic. There was, in other words, no consensus among the writers about the good of mountaineering, suggesting that its benefits were individually defined. For the Alpine Club, an assessment of their endeavors as simply personal presented a key undesirable consequence: it would prohibit them from forming the club as an agency by which participants in its project could access a form of social authority. Consequently, when the club published the first edition of the Alpine Journal in 1863, the editors went to great pains to control the ways in which the contents of that publication and the activities to which they referred were received. Doing so involved constructing the project of mountaineering as field carried out by a type of a person whose interests and desires were consistent with national interests and concerns, especially, as Peter Hansen has explained, concerns with the current status of British masculinity and military fortitude.

This construction of the field and a type of person was carried out by two general strategies in the Alpine Journal. The first of these involved framing the readerís experience of the narratives in such a way as to demonstrate the relationship between the individual ascent and the progress of the nation. Framing of the readerís experience was accomplished primarily through three different methods: (1) through the layout and organization of the journal as a serial publication, (2) through the inclusion of an introductory address, (3) through the use of a carefully constructed opening narrative which suggested that the personal narratives of experiences in mountains included in the journal be read allegorically.

Interestingly, the Alpine Journal is organized around conventions of publication that are consistent with those employed in the production of contemporaneous scholarly and professional journals. Its volumes, for instance, are conventionally dated and numbered, consisting of bound editions with continuous pagination. Like most journals, its title page is headed by the title of the publication, the Alpine Journal, and in smaller typeface, the subtitle (A Record of Mountain Adventure and Scientific Observation), the name of the organization, the editorís name, dates and publication information. The contents pages display a systematic organization of articles and notices. The articles of greatest significance, the narratives of ascents and excursions written by club members, are listed first and in alphabetical order by the name of peak, region or other key word. The table of contents then lists the articles of lesser interest. The journal allocates an entire section to "Notes and Queries," which, as the "Introductory Address" to the first edition notes, was "open to all persons interested in the matters with which [the Club] concerns itself" (AJ1:2). This section is further subdivided with each subdivision listed alphabetically. These include "Alpine Byways" (short descriptions of mountain tours), "Letters to the Editor," "Miscellaneous" articles, "Short Narratives" on peaks and passes of lesser significance, "Queries" on different subjects, and a "Scientific" division. Both the heading of this section and the fact that these articles appear in the text in a smaller typeface than the main narratives are i ndicative of their lesser status.

While this organization of the Alpine Journal might appear largely innocent, simply a matter of publishing aesthetics, I want to suggest that these design conventions function as powerful rhetorical devices that allowed the club to be "imagined" as a community. I am alluding here to the work of Benedict Anderson who in his discussion of the role of print capitalism as one of the roots of nationalism has argued that such conventions of serial publication have provided readers with a sense of "fraternity," "solidarity" and a "deep horizontal comradeship" between individuals dispersed historically and geographically (Imagined Communities). Among other things, as Anderson has argued, these conventions work to construct the sense of a community by providing for an apprehension of the simultaneity of events, a confidence and an awareness that individuals dispersed historically and geographically are participating in a collective project that proceeds steadily and continuously through time. Moreover, this community might be characterized as a what Charles W. Anderson has called in his interesting work on the rhetoric of inquiry "the community of good practice." As Anderson notes, such rational communities provide "a background of relative stability--an infrastructure of settled meaning and dependable process--within the general atmosphere of transitoriness, flux, and change that characterizes the liberal polity" ("Human Sciences and the Liberal Polity" 348). The "community of good practice" is founded upon the participation of those who identify with it in a collective endeavor, who adhere to agreed upon rules of conduct and to disciplined ways of knowing and acting which ensure that the knowledge they produce is reliable, disciplined and efficiently accessible. The systematic organization of the Alpine Journal as represented by its table of contents, for instance, fulfills these requirements by demonstrating a consent to certain principles, rules of conduct and orders of significance. Its sections and alphabetical organization, moreover, demonstrate an efficiency of access of information. And the fact that the listing of primary articles, the narratives of ascents written by active club members, are arranged alphabetically by peak or region and not by author in no way attributes greater status to the achievement of any individual. Although credit is given where credit is due, the rules which govern the organization of this table of contents work to subordinate the personal pursuit to the collective endeavor by focusing on subjects of knowledge, not authors. The second method by which the editors of the Alpine Journal attempted to frame the readerís experience of the journal was through the inclusion of an anonymous "Introductory Address" at the beginning of the first volume. Just as the frontispiece and table of contents construct a community, the anonymity of the "Address" implies that it represents the collective interests of a coherent and homogeneous body rather than those of any particular individual. Functionally, the address served to introduce the journal and to define its project. It states, for instance, that the purpose of the Alpine Journal is to "generally, record all facts and incidents which it may be useful to the mountaineer to know," and to make this information readily accessible "to all the members of the Alpine Club, and to the public in general" (1). Rhetorically, however, these are important comments, for not only do they name the project of the journal, they name the Alpine Club member as a type of person, the mountaineer, and they figure this person as both distinguishable from and part of a common body called the public. This reference to the club member as a mountaineer should be read as an attempt to establish within British society a category of person to whom a particular form of knowledge is relevant and who as a producer of this knowledge is entitled, as persons are, to certain rights and privileges, certain forms of cultural capital that are associated with oneís status as legitimate form of being. This type of person is defined by an interest in a particular sort of object and desire to explore it. Specifically, this mountaineer is interested in the exploration and ascents of the tallest, most conspicuous, heavily glaciated and unclimbed peaks in a region, as both the peaks named as "first-rate" in the following passage and the illustrations included in the journal make clear.

From the perspective of one reading at the beginning of the 21st century, the concern that the Alps were nearly exhausted might seem rather surprising, for the development of new routes in the Alps has continued consistently over the past 135 years and still continues today (I will have more to say about this later). The notion that the Alps may soon become exhausted for a supply of narrative should not, however, be unfamiliar to readers of scientific travel writing from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which imagined the possibility of a descriptive project that could document the finitude of knowledge about the natural world. As this passage makes clear, the limits of this descriptive project are defined by a set of values concerning what sorts of objects are "great" or "first-rate," what sort of mountain is worth climbing and what is not of interest to the mountaineer. It is useful to note that this sort of conquest by ascent is figured as the destiny of the Englishman, for this is the key tropeóthe association of the project of mountaineering with the progress of the Anglo-Saxon raceóby which the Alpine Club gained established itself as a legitimate social agency.

The attempt to associate the project of mountaineering with the progress of England is perhaps no more obvious than in the carefully constructed account of an ascent of the Mt. Della Disgrazia in northern Italy, which immediately follows the "Introductory Address" in Volume I and serves as the third method by which the readerís experience of the Alpine Club project is framed. Written by club member, Edward Shirley Kennedy, "The Ascent of Mt. Della Disgrazia" carries out the process of associating the personal with the national allegorically. Through a careful construction of time in the essay that revolves around the figure of "a day," Kennedy allows, as Coleridge tells us about allegorical writing, one set of images and agents to display moral qualities and conceptions of the mind that are not readily explicit to the reader. In this manner, Kennedy figures an ascent of a single peak as recapitulating both the history of mountaineering and the history of travel and exploration (where the appearance of mountaineering on the scene is figured as a new day in that history). And in doing so, he argues for mountaineeringís complementary relationship to travel and exploration in its contribution to the destiny of England.

The piece begins with the bells of Campanile de Sondrio ringing in a new day (literally in the town of Morbegno and figuratively in the history of travel) marked by the appearance of five "belated" travelers (the Rev. Leslie Stephen and his trusty Oberland guide, Melchior Anderegg; Rev. Issac Taylor; Thomas Cox, an English servant; and Kennedy himself) after a "day" of travel that is figured as both adventurous, alluding to the maritime and continental feats of the great British explorers, as well as tedious, alluding to the common excursions associated with the Grand Tour of Europe.

Following this introduction of the travelers, Kennedy states the party's intentions for their visit to Sondrio:

The question is, of course, rhetorical. Just as the "Introductory Address" referred to the mountaineer as a type of person, Kennedy's question doesn't refer to a specific individual but to a particular category of being and asserts that that type of person is defined by particular set of desires. Here any of the personal interests and desires that an individual might possess (those of matters antiquarian or related to physical science) are subordinated to the collective desires of the mountaineer. This is not to say that such desires and interests are unimportant or illegitimate. On the contrary, Kennedy notes that they both claimed their due. Kennedy's comments, however, allude to the fact that while the interest in an unclimbed mountain and the desire to climb it that makes the project of mountaineering possible are preeminent here, in something of utopian fashion it is a project that allows for the expression and accommodation of a variety of interests, a trope that is deployed repeatedly throughout the narrative. Referring again to the allegorical sense of the narrative, if the ascent of this mountain accommodates individuals of varying interests and inclinations, it intimates that the history of travel and its contributions to the progress of the English race itself has been made possible by accommodating individuals with a variety of interests.

To extend the allegory, it is important to note that the mountaineers did not simply appear on the scene of the narrative, identify their peak and climb it. Like the history of travel and the history of mountain exploration, accomplishment of this expedition was achieved after several attempts and failures, much reconnoitering and much puzzlement. After Kennedy declares the party's intentions they depart Sondrio and head for the town of Chiesa, their base camp where they make arrangements at a local hotel and set outólike earlier explorers with very little knowledge of the terrainóto reconnoiter the mountain. They survey the terrain, select two possible routes and return to Chiesa for dinner and for a "council" to decide on the best plan of attack. The following day they make an attempt on the mountain only to discover that they had misjudged the height and distance of its actual summit. Upon the first encounter with the mountain, this party is bewildered by the peak they encounter. Note how in the following passage, the incident of the encounter is represented through the use of sentences that gradually increase in length while incorporating images straight from the discourse of the sublime (with its reference the combined elements of chaotic and glorious nature) to establish each new discovery as dazzling and demanding of greater reverance:

The point here is, in part, to establish the peak as a legitimate object of interest, by attributing to it value as high, glaciated and conspicuous, and unknown, all features that intrigue the mountaineer. The point is, as well, to demonstrate that what makes a successful ascent possible is a particular sensibility possessed by the mountaineer which doesnít (as many travelers to Alps were wont to do) simply relish in the reverential awe of nature, but which remembers the object of venturing out into nature as motivated by conquest. Mountaineering is not to be confused, in other words, with what was frequently referred to in Peaks, Passes and Glaciers as "ordinary travel," and the mountaineer no mere "ordinary traveller" who looks at the mountains and declares them glorious but inaccessible. His sensibility allows him to proceed in the face of the mountainsí gloom and glory and to ëmake conquestí. The achievements of the mountaineer are, in other words, to be thought of as being made by a the same sensibility possessed by other great achievements in exploration. And this association becomes the key to arguing for the contribution of mountain climbing to the progress of the nation, for it is the declared ability of mountaineering to develop a sensibility that remains steadfast in the face of doubt and difficulty that makes greater national accomplishments possible, a point demonstrated repeatedly in this account.

The account of the actual ascent, for instance, is told as what more than one climber has called, "that well-told story of perseverance crowned by success." Ultimately in the face of a peak of such expanse, one farther off than anticipated, the party settles for the ascent of a lesser summit from which they are able to reconnoiter the rest of the mountain. They retreat in failure, suffer an accident on the descent (which itself offers these mountaineers knowledge concerning proper rope technique, one they employ later), and return to the hotel. After a number of days of rest, they return withmore certain knowledge and are able to make a successful ascent. Here, Kennedy makes quite a "day" out of the day the actual ascent, which again reminds the reader of the allegorical quality of the narrative. After passing part of the night at the hotel, in Morbegno now, the party (sans Taylor who found making observations more desirable than climbing the mountain and who thus does not get to participate in the glory of the accomplishment) departs at "ten minutes before one in the morning" for the della Disgrazia. They go only a little distance and are turned back on account of rain. They return to Morbegno, finish the night, have breakfast at "about ten oíclock" and make an exploration of the mountain path towards the della Disgrazia during the day. They dine, sleep, and are up again and once more en route to the mountain at "twenty minutes before midnight." They make the ascent the following day, which is characterized as a progression from one bit of difficulty to another. Upon reaching the summit, Kennedy constructs a scene in which the utopian vision of mountaineering is ultimately realized:

Invoking the various traditions carried out by different mountain climbers upon reaching the summit of a peakórelishing in a view, smoking a pipe, pocketing the highest stone, taking scientific measurementsóKennedy intimates that success is ultimately made possible by the pursuit of individuals who value an expedition and what it has to offer for any number of reasons. Kennedy is able to assert the preeminence of his view of the ascent, the exhilarating consciousness of difficulty overcome, by virtue of a dissertation on how "this effect and the results to which it gives rise form an answer more than sufficient to refute the insinuations of those who say that these excursions are without aim or purpose; that those who undertake them do so solely for the purpose of saying they have been to the top of a high mountain" (19). That answer is that mountaineering provides for "two distinct effects of bodily and mental culture:" the development of a physical aptitude as well as the excitement of a "thoughtful foresight," "self-reliance," and "a fertility in resource when difficulties are impending" (19). Thus, Kennedy finds himself "justified in claiming for Alpine climbing the first rank among athletic sports, as the nourisher of those varied elements that go to form all that is commendable in the constitution of the Anglo-Saxon character" (20). Again, Kennedy does not make the claim that mountaineering can contribute to the progress of the nation in the same way that imperial pursuits can. He canít; one canít make the argument that mountain climbing will afford some economic gain. Instead, the development of bodily and mental culture through both a physical exercise and the exercise of a sensibility that successful mountaineering demands, for whatever personal reason it is pursued, is figured as developing those qualities that make it possible for England to carry out its destiny. The positioning of this narrative, as the first narrative in the first edition of the Alpine Journal, consequently suggests that the narratives which follow be read not simply as accounts of personally edifying experiences, but as accounts of the pursuits carried out by a type of person who is performing a sort of duty.

* * * * *

The second strategy by which the Alpine Journal works to construct a field of knowledge and characteristic figure who interests were consistent with national issues was through systematic production of narratives which repressed personal ways of attributing value to mountain climbing and greatly restricted the meaning one might attribute to an excursion. The effect here is to construe a discursive identity whose motives and concerns are consistent with the declared project of the club. To be certain, the narratives that appear in the Alpine Journal are not belletristic accounts of excursions in the wilderness such as we see in American nature writing, a genre of writing about personal experiences in nature which, as Joseph Wood Krutch has explained in his seminal study of the genre, Great American Nature Writing, celebrates the "highly personal expression" of a sympathetic sort of sensibility towards nature. Both in terms of type of information provided and mode of narration, Alpine Journal narratives appear strikingly homogeneous. To sit and read through several volumes of the Alpine Journal one might get the distinct impression that he or she is reading the same thing over and over again. The names, events and places change, but the manner in which those names, events and places are represented remains strikingly consistent. This homogeneity is a critical aspect of presenting the activities of club members as a part of a collective project, for it restricts the meaning that can be attributed to a mountaineering excursion; there is little place in these narratives for paying attention to things that strike the individual fancy or for personal expression. The narratives included in the Alpine Journal should be thus read as statements that work to document the way the mountaineeróa figure that is interested in certain sorts of information and that evaluates what he sees in a consistent fashionóexperiences a particular excursion and not the way an individual experiences it. This form of experience is organized in a way that provides information relevant to constructing the historical record of the club and to assisting others who are interested in climbing a particular mountain or following a particular route of ascent.

I have found it useful to identify five features of the mountaineerís way of experiencing or knowing a region that form the expectations of the mountaineering narrative:

The extent to which these expectations are addressed depends largely upon the degree to which a writer can assume common knowledge about these different types of information, for oneís status as a mountaineer depends in part on possessing a body of knowledge assumed to be common. The opening passages of the narratives tend to be telling of this stipulation. Accounts of ascents and excursions in well-known regions, for example, tend to assume the reader will be familiar with a great deal of information. The following, for example, is rather characteristic opening passage from an Alpine Journal narrative. Written by Thomas S. Kennedy (no relation to Edward S. Kennedy), an engineer from London, about his first ascent of the Dent Blanche, a prominent peak in the Swiss Alps, it appears in the first edition:

Here, Kennedy provides information "for the record." He states what he is going to climb, how he is going to climb it, who he is going to climb it with, what the conditions were, when it took place and generally what route will be followed. The passage also assumes quite a bit of knowledge on part of its readers. It assumes, for instance, that its readers possess some knowledge about the Dent Blanche, what makes it an attractive object of interest, and particularly that it was unascended; it assumes that its readers are familiar with Peter Taugwalder and his qualifications as a guide; it also assumes that the reader knows something about Abricolla, its accommodations, and the route to there from Zermatt over the Col díErin and that both are in Switzerland. And this is because in 1863, members of the Alpine Clubómost of whom could be assumed to have climbed in Switzerlandówere quite familiar with the mountains of and travel in the Swiss Alps either by first-hand knowledge acquired through travel and/or through reading about mountaineering in the Swiss Alps. To describe these things in detail, highlighting their attractions, their qualifications, their locations and routes, would be both redundant and inappropriate, rendering questionable Kennedyís status in this community. The writerís job in this sort of narrative, then, is to provide the relevant information for the record and to enter directly into an account of the ascent.

Not all of the narratives that appear in the Alpine Journal, though, recount ascents of peaks in the Alps. Considering that the declared project of the clubwas to climb all of the "first-rate" peaks in Europe and in all the distant ranges of the world, narratives which describe expeditions (reconnaissance or climbing) to regions whose mountaineering potentials were little known appear quite frequently, even in the earliest editions of the journal. In these cases, a writer has to provide a rationale for visiting a region, an explanation for why he did what he did. The expedition narrative thus functions to record observations of a region made by "the first" mountaineer and to identify the possibilities the region holds for future mountaineering pursuits. Here, for example is the opening passage to John Ormsbyís "The Sierra Nevada," a narrative about his exploratory expedition to a little known (in 1867) range in Spain:

The invocation of Blackburn, a travel narrative and the Alpine Journal announcement that open this passage establish the possibility for mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada and authorize Ormsbyís excursion to the region. The specific information provided by each of these, especially the reference to elevation, makes it possible for Ormsby to think mountaineering because such an elevation suggests that the peaks surely must possess a key Alpine qualityóglaciers. This is important, for the success of such a reconnaissance expedition as a subject for an Alpine Journal essay rests on the degree to which one is able to locate peaks that possess the club's criteria for interest, using the Alps as the standard by which a region or peak may be evaluated. That is to say, the interest of a region is assessed by the degree to which it possesses (or can be assumed to possess) Alpine qualities.

This convention of evaluating the terrain on the basis of Alpine standards is a common feature of the expedition account and is a critical facet of knowing a region as a mountaineer. It appears again and again in Ormsbyís narrative. During the course of his narrative, for instance, Ormsby will visit the towns of Granada and Lanjaron, both known locations written up in travel narratives like Blackburnís. Unlike other travelers, he elaborates his experience of the villages on the basis of values assumed to be characteristic to mountaineers. Upon reaching Granada, he will note that given the status of the Sierra Nevada as the second highest mountain range in Europe one would expect to see "a lofty chain of mountains covered with dazzling snow stretching far away east and west" (3:4). In other words, one would expect to see another Chamonix or Zermatt. "What you do see," he explains, "looks rather like one big brownish-grey mountain, with a sharp culminating peak that does not seem to be half as far off or half as high as it ought to be." "Ought to be" is a key phrase here; it is indicative of the fact that the terrain is being evaluated with regard to a standard or norm for mountain ranges. The central Alps are that standard. As a mountaineer, who anticipates a view like one gets in Chamonix, Ormsby is obviously disappointed.

For the writer of such a narrative, much attention is often given over to documenting the approach to a peak and/or a region, evaluating encounters with reference to the interests of the mountaineer. Conventionally, this form of experience entails, not surprisingly, describing the region and its peaks for the promise they hold for future mountaineering exploits. It also, though, involves naming towns and villages visited and evaluating them with respect to the availability (or lack thereof) of accommodations and supplies; naming and evaluating the abilities of local people who might be used as guides; identifying and evaluating roads for access, terrain for its interest and beauty. Ormsbyís comments on the village of Lanjaron are illustrative:

Here the shift from knowing the oranges as a feature of one of the very loveliest spots to knowing them as "an admirable provision of nature for the comfort of the mountaineer in this fierce thirsty land" is really quite striking. It illustrates quite clearly how Ormsby is aware that evaluations of the village from the perspective of a traveler who admires its beauty have little place in a narrative about mountaineering. In addition to oranges as provisions, we see other things evaluated with reference to the interests of mountaineers: a "clean and comfortable inn" and an efficient guide whose Spanish name may be converted to English. Estévez becomes Stephen, "a name entirely calculated to inspire confidence on a mountain expedition." The allusion is to the well-known member of the Alpine Club, Leslie Stephen. Ormsby will go on to note that, "He is a thoroughly willing, good-humoured youth, strong, active, ready to walk any number of hours, afraid of nothing, and rather fond than otherwise of camping out." These are the sorts of ideal traits one might attribute to a true mountaineer and which Stephen himself was thought to possess.

Certainly a definitive feature of the mountaineerís experience is the sort of language he employs to construct a terrain as interesting or lacking interest. Being a mountaineer, Ormsby will not simply visit a couple of villages in Spain, he will also climb a few mountains, specifically Picacho de la Veleta, Mulahacen and Cerro de Caballo. From the summits of each he will describe profiles of the other peaks of the region and the general lay of the land in order to document the value of the achievement. In the following passage, Ormsby describes the scene from the summit of Mulahacen as he looks down upon the Canon de la Veleta, a deep canyon that forms a cirque beneath the three summits he ascends. He finds this canyon so impressive that he spends a great deal of time describing it:

Again, we see the invocation of a peak in the Alps, the Wetterhorn, as a point of reference for an qualitative evaluation. We also see the invocation of the words of the "gushing school" which locates the mountaineerís way of knowing in opposition to a way of knowing characteristic to non-exploratory travel narratives. And significantly, we see here not a picturesque or even sublime landscape, but a geologic landscape complete with jumbles of rocks, mountains, glaciers and precipices dispersed spatially in a scene that is constructed by attention to heights, distances, geographical orientations. These nouns and associated adjectives are all features of a mountaineerís vernacular that appears repeatedly in all mountaineering narratives. One can add to the list terms such as crevasse, serac, gendarme, couloir, slope, col and pass, among many others. They refer to the sorts of objects that excite a mountaineerís desire. Ormsby himself will note, for example, "I was so taken by the mystery of [the Corrál de la Veleta] that I was determined when I returned to Granada, from which side it was obviously more easily approached, to devote a day to exploring its recesses" (3:12-13).

As well as documenting what one sees, of course a significant aspect of writing about any expedition, to the Alps or elsewhere, is describing the actual ascent. Not surprisingly, the most prominent mode of narration is that which attends to the difficulties or obstacles presented to a mountaineerís progress on the ascent. Writers frequently employ the Alpine vernacular as well as an image repertoire to paint a heroic landscape in which the human presence shrinks into insignificance, often figuring the ascent as a battle with the savage forces of nature. Here, for instance, is another example from T.S. Kennedyís "Ascent of the Dent Blanche," that describes the traverse of a particular passage on the mountain. The route is constructed as a passage through a wild landscape, a bastion of turrets, towers and ruins, and peopled by the wild forces of nature.

While rather rich in images that construct the landscape as "weird and terrible," this passage is more than just an aesthetic gloss. It is richly empirical in its movement from landmark to landmark. Like all Alpine Journal narratives of ascents of peaks, this passage is organized around progression from one verifiable location to another, accompanied by a description of the route, how it was traversed and its significant features. The passage begins at a place that can be located by other travelers, the base of smooth rock slab, the passage of which presents difficulties and threatens success, and progresses to another identifiable feature, a "second huge and tottering ruin" that is accessed by crawling along the ridge.

This mode of narration, this narrative of the difficult ascent, can easily be read as essentially masculinist in its impulses. And, as I noted earlier, given the self-consciousness about the status of British masculinity, this reading was desirable, contributing the sense that the project of the club did indeed serve some form of social good. It can also be read two other ways though. On the one hand, it can be seen as form of egotistical self-aggrandizement, and one might say that the editors of the Times read it in this light given the skepticism they voiced in response to the Matterhorn incident. It also may be read as a mode of narration that functions to make possible a certain form of practice by communicating to future travelers information about a route that they can anticipate and prepare for. The editors of the Alpine Journal were well-aware that the discourse that they believed to be of most use to others interested in climbing mountains was easily read as self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement. And their efforts at organizing the Alpine Journal attempted to keep the narratives from being read that way.

I have often been asked about the point of paying such attention to this body of material. There are several issues at stake here. Aside from calling our attention to some of the issues that have necessitated the delimitation of ways of knowing and the repression of the personal in the organization of this field, which may be reflective of similar issues in other fields (not an insignificant matter in itself), I am interested in demonstrating some of the pedagogical possibilities afforded by various traditions of writing about personal experience. For several good reasons concerning the question of how to make use of students experience rather than treat it as unimportant, it has become conventional in the instruction of undergraduate writing to rely extensively on writing about personal experience as a pedagogical tool. Conventionally, however, the pedagogical use of personal writing has relied extensively on a single tradition of writing about personal experience, namely the belletristic essay. In recent years, strong arguments have been made on behalf of the personal essay, particularly as it allows one to transgress the problems posed by academic writing, which in its reliance on convention and fairly rigorous and discipline-specific ways of knowing is conventionally figure as hostile to the personal, the ways of making meaning that students (and professionals) bring to any situation. In another piece I have written recently, I argued that while there are certainly benefits to the belletristic essay, it is however rather inefficient in helping students to understand what is at stake in producing academic forms of knowledge and with helping them to understand what it might mean to write in a highly convention driven, disciplined and systematic form of discourse. I would say that the mountaineering narrative and the tradition of writing that it participates in can be very effective to serving these ends. One of the interesting things about these narratives is that they bear qualities that are similar to what might be broadly classified as academic knowledge. We see, for instance, many of the same rhetorical strategies for establishing authority being deployed in the Alpine Journal narrative, with its construction of the writer as a type of person, with its intensive reliance on formulae, method and convention, and with its rigorous methods of evaluation and its intensive repression of personal ways of knowing, as we see in many forms of scholarly discourse. Yet, unlike scholarly forms of knowledge, the ability to produce this knowledge requires little in the way of specialized training, with the exception of an understanding of a mountaineeringís common knowledge. It is, after all, a form of knowledge that is produced by self-proclaimed amateurs. In this sense, I would say that this sort of narrative is more effective than the use of nature writing, which has had a long standing presence in composition textbooks due to its emphasis on the expression of the personal and resistance to institutionalized ways of knowing.

Many will undoubtedly argue the importance of allowing for the expression of the personal. That, as Kurt Spellmeyer and a host of others have argued in recent years, without providing the opportunity to make meaning as it relates to their own experience, students will never develop the interest and commitment necessary to participate in the projects of scholarly communities. Moreover, as the argument goes, without making a place for the personal I desire to support the status quo, to leave academic knowledge unproblematized, allowing for the expression of a limited forms of experience. To this argument, I would say first that I am not opposed to using expressive writing except as an end unto itself. It seems a useful exercise for allowing students to see what is made possible and what is prohibited by different traditions of writing. I would say second, however, that the expression of personal experience is not the only way to problematize a field of knowledge. There is a sense which "the personal" plays a particularly powerful role in the organization of any field. I am, however, referring to the personal not as the idiosyncratic ways of knowing and making meaning that a person possesses, but as an individualís proclivities or inclinations to do one thing instead of another, to take a certain type of vacation during holiday, to study one author rather than another, to ask one set of questions rather than another. These inclinations are central to the production of knowledge in any fieldóthey are why we donít all choose to do and study the same thing. And this sense of the personal, I would argue, plays the important role of revising and transforming the values and interests around which a community coheres. I would like to close this paper by looking at how this sense of the personal has worked in the field of mountaineering to sustain the Clubís endeavors as the Alps became "exhausted" by working to redefine the values around which the Alpine Club community cohered. I believe this will help to clarify the significance of helping student to learn what is at stake in the production of convention driven discourses and how convention may be used in the service of "the personal."

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It is useful to recall that the "Introductory Address" imagined the project of mountaineering as culminating in the ascents of the worldís tallest, glaciated and most conspicuous peaks. As I stated, this objective is formulated around a set of values which figures a particular type of ascent as legitimate fodder for the journal mill. Ultimately, this is a finite project. And as the "Introductory Address" to the Alpine Journal indicated, the Alpine Club was quite aware that the "exhaustion" of the Alps was thus inevitable. There are only so many big, conspicuous and glaciated unclimbed peaks in the central Alps, and, with the ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, that region had for all intents and purposes become "exhausted" of the sort of peak with which the Alpine Club was assumed to be collectively interested. It is not at all surprising, then, that comments like C.G. Heathcoteís above should very early in the history of the Alpine Journal become quite commonplace. While this passage on the one hand, demonstrates the difficulty mountaineers had in finding legitimate objects of interest to pursue in the Alps as early as 1867, it also demonstrates a preference for a particular type of mountaineering. To many members of the club, the idea of turning to the distant ranges of the world to pursue first ascents was neither practical nor desirable. Expeditions to distant mountainous regions were both expensive and time consuming and not every member of the clubóin fact, very fewóhad either the time or the financial resources to make for North America, South America, eastern Europe, the Himalaya, much less the outlying corners of the Alps. Nor did many of them have the desire to pursue the sort of mountaineering that expeditions offered. Heathcoteís comments about a quality route beginning and ending in a hotel are telling, for they certainly are not indicative of a taste that is consistent with those necessary for excursions to distant regions. Such expeditions required a certain bend of character that allowed one to take pleasure from bad travel conditions, uncertain lodging and accommodations and unmapped terrain, all of which often left very little time for actual mountain climbing. The Alpine Clubís constituency consisted largely of professional men who had careers which allowed them the leisure to travel to the Alps on holiday, but not necessarily throughout Europe and the world. That is to say that big, complex expeditions offered the promise of a sort of mountaineering that many members of the club didnít find particularly appealing. Consequently, many club members chose to focus their pursuits around climbing activities in the Alps.

This choice to continuing climbing in the Alps, however, raises a rather sticky question: If the Alps were exhausted of the sorts of objects and excursions that the club was interested in, what legitimate place had narratives of their ascents in the Alpine Journal? Given the clubís project, the Alpine Journal could have simply become an organ for representing expeditionary excursions to regions distant from the Alps. Yet there are often as many, if not more, narratives of ascents in the Alps that appear in its pages. In a strong sense, the Alpine Club needed to allow access to its journal to those who climbed in the Alps. If the journal revolved exclusively around the activity of exploring distant regions and ascending their highest and glaciated peaks, the Alpine Club would run the risk of becoming a small elitist organization catering only to those who had the time, money and inclination to travel afar. Mostly, the constituency of the club did not desire or was able to participate in the conquering of the highest summits of the ranges distant from the Alps. By the same token, many who climbed in the Alps enjoyed making first ascentsóone could argue, as many did in later years, that making a first ascent was perhaps more important than the peak that it was made on. With the Alps "exhausted," a redefinition of the values around which the Alpine Club community cohered became necessary to make a place for the sorts of excursions that many desired to pursue. Redefining those values allowed for a broader access to the Alpine Journal which provided a variety of individuals with access to a form of cultural capital that otherwise would have been unattainable. Writing of an ascent of a "second rate" or "second class" peak, an object of questionable interest, indeed, served to authorize the decision to pursue that excursion and attributed to the person writing a particular form of status or authority. Equally as important, it made it possible and legitimate to think the possibility of such excursions on similar objects.

Because of the questionable continuity of "second rate" or "second class" peaks with the clubís project, when writing of ascents of these peaks writers faced the rhetorical task of construing the interest and legitimacy of these excursions. This was often an awkward task, for it demanded attributing Alpine qualities to a peak that was already in the Alps; that is to say, it involved attributing the qualities of the "great peaks" to a lesser peak. A. Adams Reillyís early narrative of his ascent of "The Bec de Luseny" offers a fine example of this strategy. He begins by acknowledging that the interest of the Bec de Luseny is questionable but goes on to attribute to the peak qualities assumed to be of collective interest to mountaineers through the use of adjectives commonly associated with objects of interest. He opens by noting that his peak is only "second rate," possessing "no great elevation, indeed, but [it is] the highest as well as the most beautiful of this group" (3:49 my emphasis). The ascent only takes him a short while (he is on the summit by 9:30 a.m.), but he notes that it is a nice and occasionally difficult climb. In turn, the closing statement (the place in the narrative where one conventionally makes recommendations to future mountaineers) comes to operate in correlation with the opening the statement: the opening remarks authorize the individualís choice of a certain sort of object and the closing comments attempt to cast such objects as worthy of collective attention. Reilly argues in the end that second rate peaks have something very useful to offer:

The second class peak is, for Reilly, obviously not the real thing; he assumes mountaineers are ultimately interested in other sorts of big peaks in the highest ranges. The second class peak though provides practice in the skills necessary for the real thing.

For othersómany othersóexcursions on objects of questionable interest were very much the real thing. One of the most striking examples (for the way it opened the possibility of climbing a wholly different sort of peak) of an individual taking the object of questionable interest for the real thing was Clinton Dentíspassion for the Aiguille du Dru, near Chamonix. An avid mountaineer, Dentís career as a surgeon and as an examiner in surgery at Cambridge afforded him the means for mountaineering (he later became president of the club and one of the foremost mountaineers in the Caucasus region). A good thing too, because it took him no less than eighteen attempts over a six year period (1873-1879) to succeed in ascending the Dru. His is the archetypal story of perseverance crowned by success. Beginning with his 1874 narrative on "Two Attempts on the Aiguille du Dru" (7:65-7), the tale ends in 1879 with another narrative, "A History of an Ascent of the Dru" (9:185-200). While the second narrative is the culminating piece, the first is extraordinary for doing two important things: it tells the story of an unsuccessful ascent in the Alps (which as Dent notes is "an unparalleled thing. . . going against all precedent"[7:65]) and produces the Dru as a legitimate object of interest. The effect is to make possible both the presence of other narratives of attempts and the ascents of mountains of a similar character.

Speaking from the perspective of a modern mountaineer, it is difficult to imagine how the Dru might not be considered an object of interest to mountaineers; it is an ominous and conspicuous mountain which, with its enormous granite walls, is the sort of peak that tends to make the modern climberís palms sweat. But because it is a big rock lacking the requisite glaciers, it was not the sort of thing that most mountaineers were interested in around 1874. Like Reilly, Dent authorizes his decision to ascend an object of questionable interest first by addressing the qualities that might make its interest questionable to his colleagues. This is an extremely important move for situating himself within the Alpine Club community because it demonstrates that the writer is quite aware of the values and of the collective issues with which a community is assumed to be concerned. Dent is well-versed in the field of mountaineering. Consequently, he is prepared to address possible objections and begins by constructing the interest of the Dru in a truly memorable passage:

There are two possible objections to his decision to climb the Dru that Dent entertains here, and he addresses them in such a way as to present the Dru as something which demands respect, particularly from mountaineers. First, he anticipates objections to the Dru as a significant peak on the basis of its height, "12,517 feet only," which he promptly responds to by pointing to another important quality of the peak: it may not be tall, but it is conspicuous. Moreover, it is threateningly conspicuous, with its "vast dark precipices on the north face, with its long lines of cliff, broken and jagged, and sparsely wrinkled with gullies, free from a patch or trace of snow," frowning down on the people at the Montanvert (a tourist haunt at the end of the tram above Chamonix), who treat the peak with indignity, photographing it, painting it, gawking at it. The passage is steeped with the mountaineerís vernacular that we have seen in other narratives. The point is very clear: Dent wants to stress that the peak has not been, in the words of more than one mountaineer, "properly consecrated;" it is worthy of a mountaineerís respect. Second, Dent responds to the often made insinuations that the Dru is nothing more than pinnacle on a ridge. Again his response is that it needs to be treated with more respect. It is not simply a tooth of rock on a ridge but, using quite a wild image, "a canine tooth in a gigantic carnivorous jaw." Moreover, it has another quality of a significant peak. It is a peak in and of itself; it just depends on where you look at it from. The final image of the passage with its analogy of learning Latin and the relationship between respect and being beaten, figures such desire as natural and again alludes to the notion that the difficulty of ascent contributes to the development of "culture," a term employed by E.S. Kennedy.

It becomes clear, however, that Dent is not too far out of line with his desire. Like Ormsby, Dent is able to situate his decision to attempt an ascent historically. The Dru has attracted the interests of other mountaineers, namely E.S. Kennedy and R. Pendlebury, the latter of whom furnished notes on an attempt that Dent discusses at length. The lengthy description of Pendleburyís unpublished account should not seem at all surprising. Given the historical emphasis of the Alpine Club project, it is Dentís responsibility to provide any and all information on the (mountaineering) history of the peak. Similarly, in the later narrative, he will open with another description of an ascent that may have preceded his own undertaken by than J.D. Forbes, a prominent scientific explorer of the mid-nineteenth century who wrote extensively about the Alps and is commonly invoked in order to authorize a questionable object of interest. Although a narrative of his attempt was published in the French Annuaire for 1878, "owing to an absence of detail," Dent suggests that the account "may legitimately be questioned and criticised" (9:186-187).

In the long run, Dent will suffer the same fate--twice--as his predecessors on the Dru. He is defeated on the mountain not by time or weather (although on the first attempt these become factors) or incompetence, but by "sheer difficulty." It is on the basis of this difficulty and the challenges it provides that Dent maintains the construction of the mountain as an object demanding of respect. The first attempt, for instance, involves a conundrum of just getting to the mountain. Departing at one in the morning from Chamonix, they hike up towards the Dru noticing that, unlike most of the big conspicuous peaks, the closer they get the more difficult it is to discern. Deciding on the peak, they have difficulty selecting the proper route of ascent. Having selected the route, getting to the base becomes a nightmare because they have to cross a "preposterous glacier," with "a longitudinal bergschrund running up its whole length, instead of the normal transverse crack," and this feature "vexed [them] hugely." Vexed is indicative of the response of the party to the various difficulties which the mountain presents, difficulties which time and again culminate in the impossibility to ascend any further, forcing them repeatedly to descend or turn back in order to try a new way. The difficulties they encounter on this peak are, then, of no ordinary order. They consist not of the repetitive motion of cutting steps up a long snow slope, or the simple following of a ridge. Nor do they pose the sort of difficulty where, as was the case with T.S. Kennedyís narrative earlier in the chapter, one can simply crawl along a ridge or brave the threatening elements of nature. They are difficulties which require a sort of problem solving, where the mountain is figured as a puzzle one has to crack:

Like narratives about ascents of first rate objects of interest, this attends to difficulties which are posed by distinct features of a route. Unlike big snowy mountains, however, the route to the tops of this type of peak is not obvious (one canít simply follow a ridge, couloir or snow slope). The difference with this narrative is that we see multiple possibilities for overcoming difficulties: either get a ladder (which he ultimately does on the successful ascent) or try another course of action.

Ultimately, it is both a class of object and this problem-solving activity provided by the object that Dent attempts to justify as a matters of collective interest to the club. Dent will close his narrative with an intensely rhetorical passage which does nothing less than establish the legitimacy of the pursuits he advocates by identifying them with the pursuits of the founders of the club. Note, however, how he stresses a difference between the past and present:

I admire this passage for the way it draws on the past to look forward, noting the transformation of values that is redefining the object of the Alpine Club and realizing that the changes that take place are at once unfathomable but inevitable. Again, I would say such a transformation is necessary in any field, in part to redefine the values of a community to make place for historical change as well as to make possible a place for the interests of individuals who choose to identify with a community.

Works cited