The Last Mountain and the Last Words of Jerzy Kukuczka: The Mountaineer’s Diary as Panorama and Oligopticon

Abstract

During his last expedition and just before his death on the South Face of Lhotse, the world-renowned Polish high-altitude climber Jerzy Kukuczka wrote a brief diary that provokes some general questions concerning the inner motivation of a mountaineer, but also the nature of mountaineering literature, to which the diary belongs. The laconic style of the diary suggests, following Philippe Lejeune, an invisible galaxy of the untold and unknown context beyond the text. Instead of reducing the diary to a literary text, the article attempts to treat it as a kind of logical tool that creates a cultural model of the world. Applying the anthropological concept of the collective, it analyzes Kukuczka’s diary as a kind of ontological mediation between nature and culture. Following Bruno Latour, the diary can be seen as both an oligopticon and a panorama, combining the richness of a partial network of collectives created in the process of climbing with the general view of the setting as the substantial entity of the mountain.