The Rope Dancer

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter One - Climbing Literature

i/ Introduction

ii/ Climbing Stories

iii/ Climbing Fictions

iv/ One Green Bottle and Solo Faces

v/ Conclusion
Chapter Two - Nietzschean Existentialism

i/ Introduction

ii/ The Rope Dancer

iii/ Superman vs Overman

iv/ Eternal Recurrence

v/ The Edge of the Abyss

vi/ Conclusion
Chapter Three - Place and Fiction

i/ Introduction

ii/ Eudora Welty

iii/ Place and Imagination

iv/ Field trips – Zarathustra in Kazakhstan

v/ Iga Warta–Place, Story and the Search for Belonging

vi/ The Reciprocity of Place and Character

vii/ Conclusion
Chapter Four - Character and Hero

i/ Introduction

ii/ Nietzsche’s People

iii/ Rick Takes Over

iv/ Conclusion
Conclusion – Aspects of the Novel

Endnotes

Appendix

Bibliography
Introduction

And I have chosen the title Aspects because it is unscientific and vague, because it leaves us the maximum of freedom, because it means both the different ways we can look at a novel and the different ways a novelist can look at his work.

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there, but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Artists have a reputation for being suspicious of analysis, but writers, perhaps because of their proclivity for words in the first place, often engage in discussion regarding the art of the novel. Creation and analysis may be very different activities, but so long as their separateness is kept in mind, there is no reason why they cannot complement each other. A novel is in a continuous process of becoming: becoming as the author writes it, as the reader reads it, and as the critic examines it. An essay such as this one aims at continuing with the process of becoming, not at bringing it to an end. As with many novels, The Rope Dancer dramatises problems and examines symptoms. One of the intentions of the following discussion is to lift the profile of these issues, to bring them into sharper relief than they are in the busy landscape of the novel itself. Another aim of this essay is to reveal certain facets of the writing process and factors that conditioned the emergence of the story. To these ends, the aspects selected for discussion are four in number: Climbing Fiction; Nietzschean Existentialism; Place and Fiction; Character and Hero. Within each chapter of this essay there is a flow back and forth between personal thought and academic discussion. There are resulting shifts in tone corresponding to the relatively scholastic or private nature of what is discussed. This mirrors the nature of the overall task that is at once practical and creative, as well as being investigative and reflective.

Given the particular nature of this thesis, consisting as it does of a novel and accompanying discourse, and considering the relative rarity of this type of project, it is worth briefly explaining what the following discussion does not aim to do. Despite, as Rick observes in The Rope Dancer, our education system’s approach to the study of literature, a novel is not a word puzzle. Thus, The Rope Dancer is not some kind of cryptic brainteaser with this essay as a list of answers. In his Aspects lectures, E.M. Forster shuns the use of elaborate theoretical apparatus in his exposition of the nature of novel. He says: “Principles and systems may suit other forms of art, but they cannot be applicable here …” (Forster 1927, p.38). On this point I disagree with Forster, but then in 1927 there is no way he could anticipate the succeeding developments in literary theory that would deepen our understanding of the novel. For example, since the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, our view of the relationship between author, the “meaning” of the novel, and the reception by the reader, has never been the same.1 When Barthes pronounced the author dead,2 his analysis not only put the question of the “intentionalist fallacy” somewhat to rest,3 it opened up the field for a Nietzschean perspectivism4 in which everything is potential “truth”, so long as one remembers that the only real “truth” is that there is no absolute “truth”. Nevertheless, despite these observations, like Forster, I intend deliberately to avoid employing a theoretical framework in this essay. As a result, this dissertation is not an exegesis in the strict sense of the word: it does not aim to explain the meaning associated text. In the following discussion there will be no attempt to reveal The Rope Dancer’s ontological truth. Nor is this essay an exercise in deconstruction; there will be no exposure of the hidden propositions and unspoken preconceptions at work in the text. These theoretical tasks, along with other worthy academic exercises, are for someone other than the author. Thus, rather than being an exercise in literary theory, this essay is an exploration of certain aspects of The Rope Dancer as a way of providing signposts to the larger, and more important, territory of the novel itself.

The four main chapters in the body of this paper form relatively independent pieces within the overall essay. Chapter One doesn’t focus closely on The Rope Dancer itself. Instead, the aim is to look at climbing fiction broadly as a way of creating a context for the succeeding chapters’ discussion of theme, place and character. Chapter Two considers the Nietzschean subtext of The Rope Dancer and includes observations of novels by London , Kundera and Yalom. This serves to draw out the thematic plan of The Rope Dancer and point to some similarities and differences between my work and other novels inspired by Nietzsche. In Chapter Three, Eudora Welty’s thoughts are used as a departure point for a discussion of the concept of place. A relatively informal description of field research is followed by a personal comment on the power of place and, in particular, the importance of story to me as a way of “belonging” in Australia. The second part of this chapter takes a more theoretical look at place. Just as phenomenology argues that we are intimately a part of our environment, so too in fiction there is a reciprocal relationship between character and place. The discussion of how place affects character leads to Chapter Four’s examination of character development in The Rope Dancer. There are two aspects to this: first, the way the characters evolved during the writing process and second, the way the character Rick changes over the course of the novel itself. Having pointed to some of the main aspects of The Rope Dancer, some questions may present themselves: is it a novel about climbing? Or is it about existentialism, or the power of place or the eternal struggle for identity? The essay’s conclusion suggests that as much as The Rope Dancer is about all these things, it is also a story about storytelling. Threaded throughout the novel is the idea that the world encountered is a world created through narrative.

The Rope Dancer is, first and last, a story. It is a story about a group of people who live in Melbourne around the year 2000, some of whom write, party, have sex, take drugs, go climbing and occasionally die. The Rope Dancer is not, however, a documentary type of story that aims for a simple rendition of events; it ventures into inner landscapes of the protagonists and tells stories of the mind, of the impact of the past upon those minds, and it demonstrates how memory activates attitudes and new stories in the living out of a life. In The Rope Dancer, mountain climbing provides an archetypal and symbolic context for the human journey towards self-hood; it is a story that explores how both obstacles from the past, and also those created involuntarily from the unconscious world, participate in the search for self. Of course, that is not the whole of the novel, but that is the way with novels; we make of them what we will. A novel’s various aspects are tightly interconnected – like a knotted ball of string – but teasing the strands apart, playing with the knots for a while, is a way of explaining the novel whilst leaving the novel unexplained. Everyone who reads The Rope Dancer will read it differently, and nobody should mind.
Chapter ONE
Climbing Literature

Novelists seem to be stricken with palsy in mountain air. This is not an explanation, of course, but it is difficult to account for their almost continuous bad luck.

Claire Engel, Mountaineering in the Alps

The best literature of mountaineering is no more written for mountaineers than was Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea written for fishermen.

William Dowie, Solo Faces: American Tradition and the Individual Talent
i/ Introduction

Climbing is the metaphor that organises the themes, that provokes the characters, and is the engine that drives the plot in The Rope Dancer. In order to provide a context and position for The Rope Dancer, this chapter takes a short look at mountaineering literature and the emergence of the climbing novel. Responses to fiction from within the climbing community have often been unfavourable. I argue that criticisms of climbing fiction are mistaken in their blanket judgements about the ability of authors to fictionalise climbing, and also misplaced in terms of understanding the role of fiction. I suggest that climbing fiction, whilst using the organising metaphors of mountains and ascent, is not really about climbing. To reinforce this point, two well-regarded climbing novels, One Green Bottle (Coxhead 1951) and Solo Faces (Salter 1979) are briefly considered. This investigation serves a dual purpose: first it illustrates clearly that many criticisms of climbing fiction are invalid; second, analysing these novels implicitly points to parallels in how climbing, and climbing locations, are used to develop theme and character in The Rope Dancer.
ii/ Climbing Stories

Mountains have figured in literature of all sorts since antiquity. Mountains form strong metaphors for human development; the higher you go the closer, perhaps, you get to God. As Armand E. Singer (1982), in the introduction to Essays on the Literature of Mountaineering, observes: “Since time out of mind, mountains have served as religious symbols…[and]…It scarcely needs saying that external nature – mountain, plain, or sea – inspired literary reactions at least as long ago as the descriptive similes of Homer and Virgil” (p.i). Bates (1978), in his dissertation A Study of the Literature of the Mountains and of Mountain Climbing Written in English, observes that the ancient Greeks and Hebrews “…felt a strong religious significance in high places. It was on Mount Moriah that the Lord tested Abraham, on Sinai that he gave the tablets to Moses, and on Carmel that Elijah threw into confusion the prophets of Baal” (p.3). The ancients were, however, too busy surviving to be much interested in what we might call recreational climbing. As a result, early literary references to mountains tend to be abstract and allegorical. In 1492, Antoine de Ville reached the summit plateau of Mont Aiguille. His party was ordered to climb by King Charles VIII of France and the reasons, since none are readily forthcoming, seem to be simply because it was there (Messner 1992, pp.16-19). Antoine de Ville’s description is possibly the first literary account of climbing for climbing’s sake. The European Alps increasingly became venues for leisure and amusement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and poets such as Wordsworth and Shelley incorporated mountains in their vision of the romantic sublime. Mountain scenery, though not climbing as we know it, is also to be found in eighteenth-century novels. “Nevertheless, mountains in those works always remind the reader of the wild pointed rocks depicted in the Renaissance paintings: they are very steep, fantastic and ugly, and they serve no purpose except that of closing a vista or of being the haunt of hermits – Alpine hermits were much in demand at one time” (Engel 1952, p.278). By the late eighteenth century, mountain climbing had made it onto the stage, appearing in comic operas, and then, in the following century, there were musicals, romantic dramas and satirical farces (Thorington 1940, p.98-107). Exactly what constitutes the first proper mountaineering novel is open for dispute. Die Alpinisten by Franz Wiehmann, published in 1900, is a likely contender (Salkeld & Smith 1990, p.9), though the humorous Tartarin sur les Alpes by Alphonse Daudet appeared in 1885 (Engel 1952, p.277). Regardless of what actually constitutes the prototype, if in fact there is one, by the twentieth century novelists had fully grasped the dramatic potential of climbing. In 1986 Jill Neate could refer to “some 300-400 titles, according to one’s definition of [mountain fiction]” (Neate 1986, p.viii).
iii/ Climbing Fictions

Not everyone has been impressed with the way climbing has been explored in fiction. Novelists are criticised for either over dramatising the reality of climbing, or for failing to provide authentic portraits of the experience and the participants. Claire Engel commented in 1952, and then repeated in 1971, her view that, “There is one branch of mountain literature which is still an almost complete failure, and that is fiction. In whatever language they have tried to recapture the spirit of mountain expeditions, writers have never succeeded in bringing their characters to life” (Engel 1971, pp.277-278). Engel is not alone in being unimpressed with climbing fiction. In 1989, the English magazine Climber and Hillwalker said, “You’d have thought that by now writers would have given up trying to turn the climbing experience into a novel” (Salkeld & Smith 1990, p.7). The reasons given for this apparent incompatibility are supposedly that good climbers can’t write fiction, and novelists can’t climb so they don’t know what they’re writing about. “A good climber is not often a good writer, endowed with a gift for fiction,” Engel writes, and further, “Mountaineering is an exacting pursuit and novelists do not often possess the physical gifts required to scale mountains” (Engel 1971, p.283-5). Hugh Merrick (1974) agrees: “The truth seems to be that great climbers are on the whole not by nature good novelists, while good novelists – a number of whom have none the less ventured to tread the slippery slopes of fictitious mountaineering – seem to know too little about climbing, or even about mountains, with frequently disastrous results” (p.59). Jim Vermeulen (1988) wonders if maybe it’s all too predictable – after all, climbing stories always involve a climb. Though moments later he thinks perhaps it’s the opposite, that it’s the lack of structure of climbing that causes the problems (p.86). Dave Cook (1988) asks, “…why fictional writing about climbing is so weak? After all a climbing trip – especially an exhibition (sic) as a subject for a book has a very clear structure; a beginning, an objective and an end, with the main characters having to deal with all manner of excitements and passions.” He then answers: “Perhaps part of the reason is that the truth has already been told. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ is the old adage” (p.18). According to these commentators it seems that since there are so many great true mountain stories, novelists would be better off staying on safer ground.

Of course, the idea that all climbing fiction is a failure is itself a fiction. Writers of the calibre of Rushdie (1988), Nabokov (1952) and Kerouac (1959) have included climbing in their work. Well known Australian climber and guidebook author, Simon Mentz, has the following to say about my first novel, The World As It Is (Leach 1998): “Though this is not a book about rock-climbing, the climbing scenes are realistic and exciting. They also work as a strong parallel to the main character’s development – the higher you go the further you see, but the harder the come down if you fall” (See Appendix 1). It obviously is possible successfully to fictionalise climbing; why then is there so much antipathy from members of the climbing community? There are two reasons. The first is a kind of arrogance that exists amongst some climbers. As Audrey Salked and Rosie Smith (1990) say:”…climbing is considered by its adherents to be somehow too sacred to fictionalize. Its vivid real-life dramas and intense loyalties, its acts of heroism and the all-too-frequent encounters with violent death are too precious, too poignant, too much part of some private lore and myth to become the raw material of fiction. Pillaging such treasure is seen at best as exploitation or trivialization, at worst as desecrating shrines.” A climbing story “will always run the risk, however well done, of being ultimately rejected by mountaineers simply because it has been written by an outsider” (p.8). As an aspiring novelist and modest climber myself, I’m not sure how those who are resistant to climbing fiction will view my work, but one of the reasons that I spent so much time, money and effort in field research was to ensure that the climbing in The Rope Dancer is plausible and authentically rendered.

The second reason for climbing commentators’ opposition to fiction lies, I believe, in a misunderstanding of the “role of fiction as a tool for sorting and making sense of experience and emotion, of enlightenment” (Salkeld & Smith 1990, p.8) Novels, no matter how focused on mountaineering, are always about human experience rather than climbing itself. The most well expressed articulation of this principle comes from outside of climbing fiction, but it is worth quoting at length as it makes the point so clearly. Tim O’Brien, author of a number of books on the Vietnam War says:

I’ve used it [the Vietnam war] in the way Conrad writes about the sea, life on the water, stories set on boats, from Heart of Darkness to Lord Jim, from Nostromo to Typhoon to Youth. But Conrad is no more writing about the sea than I am writing about war. That is, he’s not writing about marine biology and dolphins and porpoises and waves. He’s writing about human beings under pressure, under the certain kinds of pressure that the sea exerts, life aboard vessels, the discipline of living aboard a ship at sea, the expectations of behavior that are a part of a ship’s life. Lord Jim and his act of cowardice and so on. Conrad uses the sea the same way I use Vietnam, as a way to get at the human heart and the pressure exerted on it. He’s not writing literally about sailing and sailors. At the same time, this life aboard vessels carries with it a framework for storytelling that he uses beautifully. My content is not bombs and bullets and airplanes and strategy and tactics. It is not the politics of Vietnam . It too is about the human heart and the pressures put on it. In a war story, there are life and death stakes built in immediately, which apply just by the framework of the story (O’Brien in Bourne & Shostak 2004).

What O’Brien says of marine and war literature is equally true in the area of climbing. The Rope Dancer is not about mountaineering anymore than Typhoon is about storms at sea, or The Things They Carried is about the Vietnam war. The reader in search of information about the mountains would be best served by sticking to factual accounts. In fiction, by contrast, climbing is used as a medium through which to examine the “human heart and the pressures put on it”. It is important that, for a novel to succeed, the world it creates be convincing. This is true regardless of whether the topic is climbing, war, sailing or whatever. But regardless of the subject, as Eudora Welty (1978) says, “Human life is fiction’s only theme” (p.129). There is therefore a very real sense in which it can be said that a climbing novel is not about climbing. The examples of two well-known mountain stories will serve to illustrate that novels can describe climbing satisfactorily while at the same time carrying out powerful examinations of human life.
iv/ One Green Bottle and Solo Faces

One Green Bottle by Elizabeth Coxhead, published in 1951, uses climbing as a means of analysing, amongst other things, the social forces at work in post World War Two Britain. The climbing bona fides of this novel were accepted early on. Wilfred Noyce, himself a climber, writes in his Snowdon Biography (1957); “In [ One Green Bottle] there is a sincerity and a knowledge of the subject that please…there is a ring of the genuine article about every description of a climb” (p.177). Three decades later Jill Neate (1986) was recommending One Green Bottle as “…a leading contender as the finest climbing novel ever written” (p.222). In One Green Bottle, Cathy Canning journeys from Tooley Street in the slums of Birkenhead to the Welsh mountains, and in doing so she represents the social change that meant pursuits, formerly confined to the leisured classes, became available to the masses. “Cathy Canning is the first literary representative [of the new era of climbers]…of the myriads hitherto voiceless, of the factory hands, technicians, shopwalkers, office girls, unemployed, builder’s assistants, army privates, and the rest…It is for this reason that Cathy Canning, eloquent for the multitudes hitherto silent, appeals vividly to a sense of artistic rightness; and that this is a very important book” (Noyce 1957, p.178). Coxhead’s exploration of class tensions predated the social realism of the so-called “Angry Young Men”, and her work studied more than just class, but gender also. When Harry, Canning’s initial mentor on the cliffs, says “I’ve always thought women ought to make the best climbers. They make the best ballet-dancers, and that’s the nearest parallel” (p483), something important is being alluded to; by climbing competently Canning is foraying into what was previously male-only territory. Coxhead’s relatively explicit description of pre-marital sex may have outraged members of the clergy (Salked & Smith 1990, p.1039), but it wasn’t there for titillation; Canning was in control of her own sexuality and this, too, was a demonstration of the changing times.

The influence of place is a major theme in One Green Bottle. Coxhead’s belief in the effect of social milieu is evident in her descriptions of the constraints imposed on a character by their environment. She writes:

There are deprivations so fundamental that under them the human personality becomes stunted. The inhabitants of Tooley Street lived in the half-dark, like snails at the bottom of an area grating. They saw no green, and the sky was obscured for them by the smoke from the dockyards and the streamers on the river, and the fumes from the gasworks penetrated their lungs and kept their curtains permanently grey. The year wheeled through its glittering pageant and left them totally unaware. The poets had not sung for them, nor were the great stories told or the great music sounded, only the braying of the perpetual wireless, and the glutinous repetitions of the neighbourhood cinema (Coxhead 1951, p.369).

It is only by accident that Canning is taken outside the dismal slums of her childhood, but luckily she has an immediate sensitivity for the natural world: “Her feet, which had hardly known any ground but pavements, were on this rough stuff gloriously at home”(p.374). Through climbing Canning comes to know “the ecstasy of dancing above thin air” (p.410), and the total absorption in moving over vertical ground brings a loss of “consciousness of everything except the immediate conquest of each new move” (p.427). She learns to “hear” the mountains and ultimately to be at one with them. The psychological transformation is given physical form as Canning’s whole appearance seems to change:

“What nice legs you got,” observed Christopher suddenly.

She looked at them, surprised; since she had climbed so much, her calf muscles had developed beyond the delicate spindles that Tooley Street admired. But in truth they were beautiful little legs, finely proportioned, and browned by a summer of climbing in shorts (p.467).

In the climax of the novel Canning decides on one last climb – her best and hardest – a climb that shows her that she has made it as a serious rock-climber. It also demonstrates that Canning has developed a sense of harmony with, and total absorption in, place. Climbing with her good friend Harry, “…for the most part, owing to the extreme verticality of the cliff, she was alone. Now, if ever, she could say: I am the mountain…she felt it pouring into her its comfort and its strength” (p.512). Coxhead is not offering the simplistic message that all that is needed to slough off the restraints of the English class system is a brief glimpse of the great outdoors. The characters themselves, and the constraints of their situations, are far more complex than that. What is clear, nevertheless, is the power of place to confine or transform personality.

One of the strengths of One Green Bottle is the depth and insight that is provided into the development of Cathy Canning’s character (Noyce 1957, p.176). Canning is an imperfect human being, but all the more likeable for that. She changes over the course of the novel, not just in that she takes evening classes and comes to appreciate Shakespeare, but more importantly because she becomes on the one hand more self-assertive and, on the other, more sympathetic to others. When Canning agrees to take some disadvantaged city children out for a day’s climbing, “she experienced a quite curious happiness. It was, no doubt, the gratifying consequence of having agreed to do something unselfish and truly kind”(Coxhead 1951, p.449). The broader view of life provided by the mountains gives Canning a balanced appreciation of the real difficulties that her parents had faced; she says, “Poor Mother – I’ve been a bitch to her always. But I’m better off that she ever was”(p.517). Canning’s ultimate sacrifice of her own interests for those of the two men in her life, Christopher Thwaites and Bill Powell, is notoriously unsatisfying. So much so that in 1988, Jim Perrin rewrote the ending in “On the Rock with Cathy Powell” (Salkeld & Smith 1990, p.11). What Coxhead seems to be trying to show is that her heroine’s sullen sense of powerlessness has evolved into a resolve to exercise her will as best she can. The strength that Cathy gains from climbing gives her the courage to take on her future, not escaping from her social milieu, but facing it with determination to make the best of it. One Green Bottle may be an imperfect book, but it is an interesting example of how the interaction of personality and social forces can be played out in the amphitheatre of the mountains. It shows how effectively climbing can be used as a fictional device.

In Solo Faces (1979), by James Salter, the main character, Vernon Rand, is a restless figure, climbing first in California, then in Chamonix , and finally retiring into a mythic obscurity once again on the west coast of America . Norman Mailer describes Solo Faces as a “fine, exciting and sensitive novel”; for Graham Greene it is a “Strange and interesting book”; and Mountain magazine comments that “The book is so convincingly written that one might assume that this was in fact an autobiography” (Salkeld & Smith 1990, p.1049). Clearly Solo Faces qualifies as having literary merit as well as climbing credibility. William Dowie (1982) sees the novel as in the American literary tradition of individuals in opposition to their environment, either natural or human-made. This is a reinvention of the frontier mentality of the old Wild West. “…Salter has created a personal, romantic vision that challenges the ordinary environment of the society in which it exists. He presents us with still another American West, another frontier” (Dowie 1982, p.120). According to Dowie, characters trapped by their environment can briefly succeed in freeing themselves through climbing, fishing, sailing and similar activities. Though they are ultimately drawn back into the mundane, no one can deny them the numinous experience that they briefly encounter (p.120). In this way, Rand is like Thoreau, rejecting the conventional life to live more authentically.

While I agree that Solo Faces is a very good book, like all interesting novels it is open to varying interpretations. For example, Dowie’s vision of Rand as the “…image of a man willing to challenge the impossible and still not boast of it” (p.123) seems way off mark. Late in the novel, when Rand is unable to give up climbing altogether, but is still incapable of finding security or satisfaction in human society, Salter writes: “They talked of him, however, which was what he had always wanted” (Salter 1979, p.213) What Salter is examining, through the medium of climbing, is the kind of obsessive personality common to many successful individuals: politics, sport and entertainment offering perhaps the most conspicuous examples. “It is no secret that the character of Rand was inspired by Gary Hemming (’Le Beatnik’ as he was known in France), who sparked and drifted his way through the alpine scene of the mid-sixties before putting a bullet through his head at the age of thirty-five” (Salkheld & Smith 1990, p.1049). Rand ’s egoism borders on the socio-pathological, and his failure to deal with others is parallelled by his total inability to engage meaningfully in the environments in which he climbs; Rand is so self-centred that he is impervious to the power of place. For Dowie, Rand “…reaches his apotheosis in leading a rescue team up the Dru direct to save two Italian climbers” (Dowie 1982, p.123), but it is quite feasible to read this episode as yet another example of Rand’s egomania. The rescue presents itself as something new, a way for Rand to demonstrate his superiority to the world. Driven by his own needs, Rand is prepared to drag inexperienced climbers into the rescue bid where they all too easily could have become the next accident victims. So strong is Rand’s obsession with proving he is better than anyone else that the Italians, once rescued, become like a hunter’s trophies. When the official rescue team arrives on the scene shortly after Rand ’s party, (showing that Rand ’s risky line of approach wasn’t necessary anyway) Rand won’t countenance the locals’ helping the injured descend: “No”, he said. “We got here first. They’re ours” (Salter 1979, p.147). The victims have become Rand’s property and he and no one else will have the glory of bringing them down. There are other instances in Solo Faces where Rand fails to understand that common decency doesn’t necessarily represent submission to the mundane; failing to treat his lovers with respect and neglecting paternal responsibility are two conspicuous examples. But then as Dowie observes: “Even in sex, [ Rand's] ‘love was the act of one person, it was not shared…’” (Dowie 1982, p.120). So, far from being the climbing equivalent of the lonesome cowboy, Rand is a character whose egocentricity means he cannot change and develop, cannot engage in the world of nature or of people, and so he fails to achieve any kind of personal development. Dowie seems to have missed the essential irony in Salter’s portrait of a chronically limited personality but, in the end, regardless of which interpretation is preferred, Solo Faces is a fascinating study of an extreme personality at work, and it is clear that the novel is about much more than simply climbing.
v/ Conclusion

One Green Bottle and Solo Faces are two good examples of novels that successfully combine climbing and fiction. Similarly The Rope Dancer, while a story about a group of people who go rock-climbing and mountaineering, is also an exploration of the struggle for meaning and identity, the influence of history and society, and the potential for character to unfold, or not, in response to the power of place. The Rope Dancer is not about geology, alpine biology, eagles, choughs and crevasses; it’s about the human heart and the pressures placed on it. Because of the organising metaphor of the mountains, The Rope Dancer will inevitably at some stage be placed under the heading of “climbing literature”. Climbing is, however, a very diverse activity and so, too, is the literature associated with it. This begs the question as to whether climbing does in fact have its own literature. Jill Neate (1986), who compiled Mountaineering Literature – A Bibliography of Material Published in English writes: “A practicable definition of a ‘mountaineering book’ continues to elude me” (p.viii). Meanwhile, long time climbing magazine journalist Jim Perrin asks, “So does climbing have a literature…?” and then answers: “Of course our activity’s got a literature, at one level of definition. But then, so have pigeon-fancying and child pornography” (Perrin 1999 p.32). According to Neate and Perrin, content and audience seem to be the criteria for inclusion under the heading of “climbing literature”. Along these lines, non-fiction may form a reasonably clear genre. The case with fiction, however, is not so obvious. Audrey Salked and Rosie Smith, in the introduction to their omnibus of mountaineering novels and short stories, observe that fictional mountaineering stories bridge every recognizable genre: “Detective thrillers, ghost stories, espionage, romance, farce, psychological drama – practically every style of writing and type of story that exists can perfectly well have the mountains or mountaineering as a major element” (Salkeld & Smith 1990, p.9). An interesting project, though one beyond the scope and intent of this essay, would be to apply genre theory to climbing literature to see what can be discovered.
Chapter TWO
Nietzschean Existentialism
i/ Introduction

Through a brief discussion of the choice of title, this chapter flags The Rope Dancer’s main thematic concern: how can we cope with our existential reality? D.H. Lawrence observes that, “…Because a novel is a microcosm, and because man in viewing the universe must view it in the light of a theory, therefore every novel must have the background or the structural skeleton of some theory of being, some metaphysic” (Lawrence in Allot 1968, p.104). The structural skeleton of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra gives The Rope Dancer its theory of being. Indeed, there is a strong intertextual relationship between my novel and Nietzsche’s great work. I have always believed that Nietzsche’s ideas are life affirming, and that the criticisms of him as a pessimist miss the point. “Live dangerously,” he says, in order to live a fulfilled life. Nietzsche was, I believe, referring to intellectual adventure, but the concept fits nicely with the rationale behind the more extreme forms of mountaineering. Thus, Nietzsche’s existential messages about how to live, marry well with the use of mountains as metaphors. Drawing on examples from the work of Jack London, Milan Kundera and David Yalom, this chapter shows that The Rope Dancer is part of a tradition of using Nietzsche’s ideas in fiction.
ii/ The Rope Dancer

A novel’s title often acts as a signpost: it points to a central motif or theme. One contender for my novel’s title was The Adder’s Bite, which comes from one of Zarathustra’s Discourses. Zarathustra falls asleep under a fig tree and a serpent bites him on the neck. Zarathustra cries out in pain but does not die. “When did a dragon ever die from the poison of a snake?” (Nietzsche 1883-5, p.93), Zarathustra instead thanks the snake for waking him. There are, of course, various ways in which this anecdote can be interpreted and, most typically, it is seen to comment on concepts of justice. I like the images in the episode as they offer a metaphor for the getting of wisdom. The snake is a symbol of knowledge, and knowledge can be painful, even deadly. In The Rope Dancer, Rick learns a great deal over the course of his year with Sara, but this knowledge is not without its sting. The challenge for Rick at the end of the novel is to see if he can overcome his emotional pain. Can he be like Zarathustra and thank the serpent for the bite?

During one of the redrafts of the novel, an alternative title presented itself. In the Prologue, Zarathustra arrives at a town next to a forest. Here Zarathustra finds many people assembled in the market square waiting for a tightrope walker to perform. Zarathustra initially thinks the people have come to hear him talk, and he begins expounding his doctrine of the Superman: “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss” (Nietzsche 1883-5, p.43). The crowd fails to understand Zarathustra and begins to call for the tightrope show to begin. Hearing the noise, the performer emerges from a little door and proceeds across the rope. Just as the tightrope walker reaches the middle of his course, the little door opens again and a brightly dressed fellow like a buffoon springs out and follows the former with rapid steps. ” ‘Forward, lame-foot!’ cried his fearsome voice, ‘forward sluggard, intruder, pallid-face! Lest I tickle you with my heels’ ” (p.48). Following that, the buffoon jumps over the tightrope walker, breaking his concentration and causing him to fall. The tightrope walker is fatally injured and just before he dies he laments the meaninglessness of his life. Zarathustra, however, says: ” ‘You have made danger your calling, there is nothing in that to despise. Now you perish through your calling: so I will bury you with my own hands’ “(p.48). The dying man is comforted by these words and, though he speaks no more, he motions with his hand to thank Zarathustra.

Most of my study of Zarathustra has been of Walter Kaufman’s translation where the acrobatic performer is called a “tightrope walker”. In other translations, for example Thomas Commons’s (2004), the term “rope dancer” is used. If you’ve ever seen a good climber scale a cliff-face, you’ll have noticed the almost balletic grace with which they ascend. It’s as if they dance upwards trailing a rope. This is an observation Rick makes the first time he takes Sara climbing:

Sara climbed better than any beginner had a right to…[She moved] with the poise and balance of someone born to it. She…put the moves together, flowing like a dancer on the end of the rope. She was beautiful to watch. Her limbs were long and flexible, and she was surprisingly strong for someone who had never climbed before. Her grey cotton-lycra tights finished at the knee and her calves were shaped like diamonds (TRD p.62).

The term “rope dancer” links strongly with the organising metaphor of climbing that is used throughout the novel. In addition to this, the tightrope-walking episode in Zarathustra represents key existential themes that I explore in my writing. The tightrope walker’s fate portrays the irony of human life. We can be expert performers and yet still, and perhaps inevitably, be brought down by a fool. Zarathustra says: “Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning: a buffoon can be fatal to it” (Nietzsche 1883-5, p.49). The only way to deal with the triviality of our lives is to live as best we can while we can. “For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to live dangerously!” (Nietzsche 1882, p.228). Rock climbers and mountaineers live out this principle in a literal way. Nietzsche is, however, focused on the life of the mind. He encourages us to think for ourselves, to reject authority and take responsibility for our own lives. In The Rope Dancer, Sara takes chances with her writing; she’s prepared to experiment and risk her reputation as a successful novelist. The difficulty Zarathustra has communicating his message in the marketplace is echoed in the problems that Sara has in getting her novels understood: people are more interested in entertainment than edification. For Rick, the ultimate risk lies not in climbing, but in allowing himself to fall in love. Both Rick and Sara have to deal with the consequences of their choices, but there is nothing to despise in the decisions they make. Both The Rope Dancer and The Adder’s Bite point to significant thematic developments in the novel. Either title would have served; I settled on the former in order to emphasise the importance of the novel’s climbing metaphors.
iii/ Superman vs Overman

Not surprisingly many of Nietzsche’s ideas are explored in fiction. Jack London is particularly enamoured with Nietzsche’s Superman. In The Sea Wolf, London creates one of the most compelling villains in literature. Wolf Larsen is intelligent, self-educated, unencumbered by conscience or moral conditioning, and strong, above all strong: “It was a strength we are wont to associate with things primitive, with wild animals and the creatures we imagine our tree-dwelling prototypes to have been – a strength savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion, the elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have been molded (sic)” (London 1979, p.190). Larsen rules his schooner, the Ghost, with violence and profanity and, at the same time, his bookshelf contains “Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De Quincey. There were scientific works, too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall, Proctor, and Darwin, and…Bulfinch’s ‘Age of Fable,’ Shaw’s ‘History of English and American Literature,’ and Johnson’s ‘Natural History’ in two large volumes” (p.202). For Larsen, existence is a meaningless struggle to the death. He says: “[Life] is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves, and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move; the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all” (p.203). Whilst London is excited by the idea of the Superman, he is also concerned at the potential destructiveness of an individual who cares only for himself. Hence in The Sea Wolf, London ’s “…’underlying psychological motive’ is an attempt to show that Nietzsche’s super-man couldn’t succeed in modern life; that anti-social persons in a complex society must be defeated. Had Wolf Larsen been a socialist his interest in humanity would have saved him” (Kingman 1979, p.v).

London ’s construction of the Superman, while in accord with many popular understandings of Nietzsche’s thought, is really a superficial reading of the concept. The interpretation that I prefer is closer to that indicated by Nietzsche’s original term Ubermensch, or Overman. This points to the idea as being one of self-overcoming rather than of dominating others. Nietzsche promotes a creative response to life’s dilemmas, a personal and individual overcoming that “transfigures the inadequacies of the present [which] call the meaning of life into question” (Higgins 1987, p.81). A superficial reading of The Rope Dancer might find the concept of the Superman in Rory Wilde: he is intelligent, clearly uninterested in adhering to social norms, and a superior physical specimen. Like Wolf Larsen, however, whilst there are aspects of Rory that are engaging, he is ultimately an unappealing character. Sara, on the other hand, is closer to a female version of the Ubermensch. She is physically attractive, yes, but her most important attributes are her creative insights into life. Her aim is not to defeat others, but to overcome her own life challenges. Specifically, Sara has to confront her guilt over the New Zealand climbing trip. She then faces the broader struggle of recreating her life in the wake of Michael’s death. Rick has his own obstacles to deal with and, as with Sara, guilt and grief predominate. Whether or not Rick has the strength to prevail over these is a question the novel asks rather than answers.

One of the major sicknesses that Zarathustra encourages us to overcome is the fragmentation of, and alienation from, our self. The specifics of what Nietzsche sees as the decadence of his society are obviously different to ours. Nevertheless, there are some strong parallels. Nietzsche is concerned about religion and the state. For us, perhaps it is commerce and the state. We too suffer from the “Thousand and One Goals” (Nietzsche 1883-5, p.84-86). We are constantly told to value this and value that, constantly bombarded into accepting society’s values even when they conflict with our own. We despise our bodies just as much as Nietzsche’s Christians do, though our high priests have commercial rather than theological degrees. This is what Sara rages against when she condemns “the great hoax of modern life, the deodorised, disinfected, deflavoured world we live in” (TRD p.1). When Rick makes critical social observations, I am not targeting the publishing industry or horse racing per se. Rather, it is a more general critique of the forces and values that dominate our lives. Nietzsche is primarily concerned with a society that wants to subdue the individual to either the church or the state. Perhaps we should be concerned about a society that subdues our selves to market forces. Everything is measured by how well it sells, whether it’s a book or a hamburger. Duncan’s final criticism of Sara’s The Adder’s Bite is that it didn’t sell many copies (TRD p.129). Commerce has taken the place of religion: our moral and aesthetic judgements are now economic ones. The people in Zarathustra’s market square are more interested in gymnastics than philosophy, and the market in our lives is more important than anything else. We are not encouraged to look deeply into things, to know ourselves; entertainment is more important than truth; being productive is more important than being insightful.

How is this alienation from self to be addressed? One of Nietzsche’s answers is that, by having the strength to take personal responsibility, we can create our own world and, in this way, we can live self-fulfilling rather than self-denying lives. The first step is to realise that everything is value laden. There is no objective truth. As Sara says, “Facts are what there are not…We create the truth when we create truly” (TRD p.206). Once this is grasped, then it is possible to construct our own story, our own metaphor for life. Rick and Rory do this, though in an inarticulate way. They create their own world through climbing. It’s an unthought-out resistance against the self-alienation that modern society creates. Rick says,

I found working in the bank very hard. The manufactured office atmosphere was more wearying than the thin air of high altitude, the grinding monotony of turning up each day more draining than long hikes with heavy packs. You need a lot of willpower to allow yourself to be ground down into a factor of production in the global economy, to spend your days worrying about bits of paper and what to wear. In truth I found the dangers of serious mountaineering less intimidating than the slow suicide of working for a living. The anxieties of climbing are relatively unalloyed. They simplify life. When you’re high in the mountains you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about credit-card debt or how you look to others. Climbing was the one thing that made me feel like I wanted to feel – focused, intense and alive (TRD p.84).

This attempt at protest is limited in that it lacks genuine insight. It’s not until Rick spends time with Sara that he comes to see climbing as a positive engagement with the world rather than merely an escape. Climbing, then, is a metaphor being used both by me as a mechanism to provoke change in my characters, and by the characters themselves as a way of creating their own world. Sara observes that life doesn’t make sense. Rather, “We make it make sense”(TRD p.205). And we make it make sense through metaphor. Being an Ubermensch is being able to create your own world; we cure ourselves by creating our own metaphors.
iv/ Eternal Recurrence

Eternal recurrence is a metaphor that Nietzsche develops as a way of creating meaning in life. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Milan Kundera opens with: “The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?” (p.3). At first glance the lightness of a life lived once seems more attractive than the heavy thought that everything you choose to do will infinitely recur. “In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens” (p.5). However, Kundera goes on to interpret eternal recurrence as an attempt to create meaning in a world of objective meaninglessness. Eternal recurrence gives a weighty significance to our actions: “But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become” (p.5). The whole of Kundera’s novel, however, seems to say that it is impossible to give our actions profound weight. Certainly Tomas playing the tedious role of a man who wants a wife and many lovers, Tereza’s relentless pursuit of victimhood, Sabina’s superficiality and Franz’s painful naivety, mean that the novel is populated by characters whose lives appear unbearably lightweight. Kundera’s conclusion, then, is that Nietzsche’s metaphor can never work to give human existence meaningful gravity: “Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia” (p.299). Animals can be put out of their suffering but humans have no such easy escape. Kundera says that eternal recurrence would give life weight, but that it is an unusable metaphor. He concludes “And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition” (p.298).

Like Kundera, I find the concept of eternal recurrence an unsatisfying metaphor. I’m more interested in how we create meaning by interpreting events, either as they happen or, more often, in how we reconstruct them later. This is what Rick is pointing to when he says: “…it’s what happens around the so-called facts that gives them their meaning” (TRD p.2). And of course this is what Rick is doing in telling the story of the novel: he is giving his own meaning to what happened. A significant danger associated with the retrospective creation of meaning is the prospect of being trapped by the past. Then it is as if we live our lives as a third person story, always thinking about what might have been, and our wills rage at their impotence. Thus Zarathustra observes:

‘It was’: that is what the will’s teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction is called. Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past.

The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s desire – that is the will’s most lonely affliction (Nietzsche 1883-5, p.161).

There is a double disease here: we don’t live our lives properly because we live them second hand through our memories and, further, we suffer constant frustration through our focus on events we cannot change. This is the kind of sickness that Rick suffers from. Initially, he is trapped by his recollections of his accident and memories of what a successful climber he once had been. As he works through these issues, a deeper obstruction emerges, and that is the irrational burden of guilt over his father’s death.

Nietzsche’s prescription for this all too human sickness is once again to take responsibility, to take control, by creating our own version of the past. He doesn’t mean a random concoction of recollections aimed at pretending painful events did not occur. Instead what Nietzsche wants is the adoption of an attitude that makes past disappointments bearable. This is what Zarathustra calls redemption. He says: “To redeem the past and to transform every ‘It was’ into an ‘I wanted it thus!’ – that alone do I call redemption!’ ” (Nietzsche 1883-5, p.161). That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger (Nietzsche 1908) is such a cliché now it is almost embarrassing to quote it. Nevertheless, the fact that it is over-used doesn’t detract from it being a healthy approach to life. “Orwell was right,” Sara says in one of her interviews. “We have to invent the past to control the present” (TRD p.206). The Rope Dancer shows memory as a creative process. Rick recreates his memories of the past as a way of recreating himself. In the process he liberates himself from the burden of his father’s death. The question at the end is whether he will have the strength to free himself from Sara’s death, a question to which he is not sure of the answer. Thus Rick concludes:

Now I often dream of talking to Sara, and then wake up expecting to finish off the conversation. At night when I can’t sleep, the Kazakhstan trip replays over and over in my mind, till the mistakes stand out with clarity and I undo them in my imagination. That’s the problem with the past. You can’t reverse it, and it’s hard not to get angry when you realise how easily it could have all been different. But if you went back and altered something, you would change everything. If you say yes to one thing you say yes to the whole lot. And how could I wish I’d never come to know Sara at all? Being with her was like living in colour, three dimensions, the world was full of aroma and seasoning, sound and sensation. That’s the challenge: not to slip back into the flat, black and white past tense. Sara used to say that the way to deal with disappointment was to look at everything as if you wanted it that way. It’s good theory. Hard practice. It takes a courage I’m not sure I have, a willpower I struggle to master. I mean, who hasn’t stood at the edge and felt the urge to jump? (TRD p 206).

Rick’s attempt to take control of his past through telling his version of the story links to metafictional issues that will be looked at later on in this essay. We make sense of a chaotic world by working our experiences into coherent stories, but any particular version is only true in that it is true for that specific narrator, and even then only true at that time.
v/ The Edge of the Abyss

Nietzsche’s work is sometimes described as “therapeutic philosophy”. He aims not to describe the world, but instead to explore human experience and to write prescriptions for our existential predicament. Nietzsche wants to teach us to love our fate. In 1889, Nietzsche famously wept at the sight of a coachman whipping a horse; this preceded Nietzsche’s final breakdown, and it is usually seen as an act of insanity. Kundera prefers to think that when Nietzsche embraced the horse he was “trying to apologise for Descartes” (Kundera 1984, p.290). The attempt to elevate human existence above animal life, epitomised by Descartes’s depiction of animals as machina animata, is in fact a futile exercise that in turn makes the realisation of human insignificance all the more distressing. If any real reconciliation with the human condition is to be achieved then it must not be based on any illusion of human importance. In Irvin Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept (1992), set in 1882 shortly before Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche weeps after undergoing a kind of existential psychotherapy. Yalom, himself a professor of psychiatry, aims to show that below the surface of our pathological obsessions may lie something even more serious: a profound solitude. Yalom’s Nietzsche weeps when he is released from the prison of loneliness by being able to share his feelings. In his final session with the proto-psychoanalyst Josef Breuer, Yalom’s Nietzsche says: “Before, I only half embraced my concept of Amor fati: I had trained myself – resigned myself is a better term – to love my fate. But now, thanks to you, thanks to your open hearth, I realize I have a choice. I shall always remain alone, but what a difference, what a wonderful difference, to choose what I do. Amor fati – choose your fate, love your fate” (p.301). In this way, Yalom shows that psychoanalysis and therapeutic philosophy have similar aims: it is not through intellect, but through a deep and personal understanding of our selves that we can come to real reconciliation with our fate.

Nietzsche tells us that there is a great loneliness in the human heart. This more than anything is the root cause of the longing for God. Nietzsche felt himself to be alone and Zarathustra suffers great isolation. Aloneness is a recurrent motif in The Rope Dancer; Rick almost dies alone when Rory leaves him on the slopes of Khan Tengri; Rick’s father collapses alone in the back-yard and then dies in the solitude of his madness; Sara dies by herself on the mountain; Rick begins the novel alone and finishes it alone. Without God we exist at the edge of the void. Thus Zarathustra asks, “…where does man not stand at an abyss? Is seeing itself not – seeing abysses?” (Nietzsche 1883-5, p.177). How do we deal with this without going mad? The first and most common way is not to look, to adopt a religious faith, or, more recently, use the opiates of consumption and television. The Apollonian solution, which is better than pretending the abyss isn’t there, is to hide the abyss with artistic beauty, to focus on appearances, but of course to do so is to rely on art to make bearable the Dionysian insight that it is better “…not to be born, not to be, to be nothing” (Nietzsche 1872, p22). A further alternative is the way of Socrates: the belief that reason can make sense of human experience. At root, however, human experience doesn’t make sense – it is chaotic and irrational. This is what Hamlet and Dionysiac man understand: “…both have truly seen to the essence of things…and action repels them; for their action can change nothing in the eternal essence of things, they consider it ludicrous or shameful that they should be expected to restore order to the chaotic world. Understanding kills action, action depends on a veil of illusion…True understanding, insight into the terrible truth, outweighs every motive for action…” (Nietzche1872, p.39). It is this that Rick glimpses when left alone on the slopes of Khan Tengri, and it is the terror of this insight that paralyses him far more than his injuries.

Instead of building an edifice of hope on a foundation of illusion, Nietzsche would have us to look into the abyss, admire its power, and then muster the courage not to jump. That is the way of the Ubermensch. This is why in Kazakhstan Sara risks going to the edge of the crevasse. She writes in her notebook:

Rick feeds out the rope and I creep gingerly to the edge of the crevasse, wondering if I’m being totally stupid, but unable to contain my curiosity. It’s only a few metres across, but it’s deep beyond my imaginings. Beautiful and awful, terrifying and yet compelling in the dead silence of the breathless afternoon. At the top the bright sun lights the ice a glorious glacial blue, then the colours grade down, through aquamarine to navy, and then to a dreadful, bottomless black. The crevasse seems to go right down into the mountain, into the very centre of things. My insides rush with vertigo. It’s far more frightening staring into this abyss than looking down from the great height of the mountain. I’m terrified. Some part of me wants to jump, and I’m glad I’m tied to the rope

Of course the power of the void makes us want to jump, but if we are strong enough we can use this terrifying vision to create great art, music, tragedy, or, more importantly, to live fully. Michael says, “We have to do what we can, don’t we? Otherwise old Silenus was right” (TRD p.56). This is no trivial platitude. Michael has looked into the abyss. It is Michael’s Dionysian insight, combined with Sara’s Apollonian beauty, that brings Rick to discover value in life after his Socratic approach fails the test of his father’s death and his accident on Khan Tengri. Nietzsche’s assertion of the absurdity of the human condition is sometimes interpreted as pessimistic, but this misunderstands the message. It fails to accommodate the fact that “…whatever superficial changes may occur, life is at bottom indestructibly powerful and joyful” (Neitzsche 1872, p.39). It is the ultimate triumph of the Ubermensch to have the courage to say; ” ‘Was that life? Well then! Once more!’ ” (Nietzsche 1883-5, p.178).
vi/ Conclusion

Modern literature evolved in response to the world being mapped out on Cartesian diagrams. Whilst Galileo was probing the stars, Don Quixote was jousting with windmills, and Lear and Gloucester were lost in an indifferent world – the blasted heath being a powerful metaphor for the experience of the void. Emerging science may have countered the malady of superstition, but without the comfort of dogma, humanity’s place in the universe was frighteningly insecure. In the sixteenth century, as science tried to remove subjectivity from the world, it was up to writers to maintain the memory of human experience. “Shakespeare was already enlarging the scope of the play beyond the Greek unities of space and time, because he wanted to include more of life. The novel was the logical next step” (Wilson 1986, p.230). Shakespeare therefore didn’t so much invent the human but explore the experience of being human, most powerfully through the tragic hero. Cervantes attempted something similar through the mock-heroic, and this inevitably led to Richardson’s Pamela reminding everybody how extraordinary everyday life really is. Thus the novel was, and still is, a challenge to the drive to distil human life and experience into numerical formulae. Milan Kundera believes that: “The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, ‘the forgetting of being’” (Kundera 1988, pp.3-4). This is why, for Kundera, “the founder of the Modern Era is not only Descartes but also Cervantes…If it is true that philosophy and science have forgotten about man’s being, it emerges all the more plainly that with Cervantes a great European art [the novel] took shape that is nothing other than the investigation of this forgotten being” (pp.4-5). Our lives are not simple and rational; they are not scientific. Life is complex, chaotic and certainly absurd.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is a story. It’s not a novel in the way we would usually conceive of one, but it does use narrative structure, character development and many common literary techniques. In employing this strategy, Nietzsche taps into a long tradition of using the power of story, with the use of metaphor, symbol and character, to explore what it is to be human. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche does something parallel to what he describes in Birth of Tragedy: the rationality and artistic surface of Apollo is combined with the profound insight of Dionysus. Meaning is created through metaphor, and resonances and repetition give the work a musicality. Z arathustra has inspired writers as diverse as D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir. I’m not going to pretend for a moment that that I belong in such illustrious literary company, nor that The Rope Dancer aims for the profundity or originality of Zarathustra. Nevertheless, through the examples of London, Kundera and Yalom, it is possible to see The Rope Dancer as existing in the tradition of using Nietzsche’s ideas in fiction, and that this is part of the broader literary project of grappling with existential reality.
Chapter THREE
Place and Fiction

I’ve never been certain whether I’m a climber who writes or a writer who climbs. Torn between both, I have probably wasted a good deal of time writing when I could have been climbing, or climbing when I should have been writing. Still, I can’t complain. Climbing has been good to me…giving me the raw material and courage to write.

Greg Child, Mixed Emotions
i/ Introduction

The novelist Eudora Welty had some interesting things to say about the importance of place in fiction. Her observations are a useful starting point before turning to my own views. The first four sections of this chapter discuss the effect of place on the writer. I call extensively on details from my field trips to illustrate how this research went into The Rope Dancer. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said writers should “murder their darlings”, and field investigations well demonstrate this principle. There were many interesting things that I studied which didn’t make it into the novel. For reasons of space, I only point to a few of these, but they serve to illustrate that a great deal of research doesn’t appear in the final version of the novel. I then go on to a personal discussion about the difficulties of developing a sense of place in Australia, and the importance of storytelling as a way of creating a sense of belonging. Section six, “The Reciprocity of Place and Character”, uses phenomenology as a theoretical framework for understanding how place has the capacity to confine, to move and to change a character in significant ways. The contrasting places in The Rope Dancer, such as the chookshed, the racetrack and Gariwerd, all work in different ways to define character. Place is central, for example, to Rick’s struggle for identity. Place may create character but of course a narrating character, by describing place, also creates it, and so there is a mutuality in the relationship between character and place. This reciprocity is why phenomenology can offer a useful way of looking at place in a way that is particularly relevant to climbing fiction.
ii/ Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty, a Mississippian writer famous for the strong depictions of place in her own writing, opens her 1978 essay, “Place in Fiction” with the following observation:

Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction, perhaps the one that gazes benignly enough from off to one side, while others, like character, plot, symbolic meaning, and so on, are doing a good deal of wing-beating about her chair, and feeling, who in my eyes carries the crown, soars highest of them all and rightly relegates place into the shade (p.1).

Welty maintains that, even if in her mind place is of lesser importance than some of the other aspects of fiction, nevertheless place is much more than simply setting. She quotes Henry James as saying that there “isn’t any difference between ‘the English novel’ and ‘the American novel,’ since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad” and, Welty goes on to argue, it is place that has a good deal to do with the “goodness”, or otherwise, of a novel (p.1). Central to this is the way that feeling is created. Place is a kind of crucible where “recognition, memory, history, valor, love, all the instincts of poetry and praise, worship and endeavor” are alloyed to create the all-important “feeling” of the novel. Welty says:

feeling profoundly pertains to – place…Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. Imagine Swann’s Way laid in London, or The Magic Mountain in Spain, or Green Mansions in the Black Forest…From the dawn of man’s imagination, place has enshrined the spirit; as soon as man stopped wandering and stood still and looked about him, he found a god in that place(p.4).

With this last comment, Welty is not trying to give place an explicitly religious nature. Instead she is emphasising the power of place to move us, to create feeling in reader and author. How does place do this? Firstly by the way it inspires creativity. The power of place stimulates feelings that operate on the writer, feelings that encourage a focussing of awareness and insight in order to create works of beauty and meaning. Welty says:

in art, from time to time, place undoubtedly works upon genius. Can anyone well explain otherwise what makes a given dot on the map come passionately alive, for good and all, in a novel – like one of those novae that suddenly blaze with inexplicable fire in the heavens? What brought a Wuthering Heights out of Yorkshire, or a Sound and the Fury out of Mississippi? (p.4).

Welty goes on to argue that a “sense of place is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind; surely they are somewhere related. It is by knowing where you stand that you grow able to judge where you are” (p.7). This doesn’t necessarily mean that place need promote a vision of the sublime in order to stimulate the writer. Indeed, with the novel, it is often the day-to-day of human experience, bound up with feelings about the particular place, which form the artistic vision. It is the intimacy of the author with the place that “animates the whole of [the] work” (p.3). And, more than simply exciting the author, place acts as a “ground conductor” between writer and reader, its physical texture allowing for the passing of the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction. It is important as part of the process of creating feeling, and it does this not just through the power of the physical texture of place, but also through the role of place in creating character. Place “has a good deal to do with making the characters real, that is, themselves, and keeping them so…Place, then, has the most delicate control over character too: by confining character, it defines it” (pp.3-4). For Welty, then, place is important for the author and character, and for the relationship between the reader and the work. The following discussion will show that my views of place have a great deal in common with Welty’s.
iii/ Place and Imagination

Am I a writer who looks for strong physical experiences, especially those produced by contact with the natural world, so that I have some concrete material to write about, or am I someone who loves spending time interacting with nature, and who then gravitates to writing as a way of communicating and making sense of these encounters? An example from my field research for The Rope Dancer may shed some light on this. In northern Gariwerd, a short walk from an obscure dirt road, there is a wide-mouthed cave that opens onto a clearing bounded by wattle, thryptomine and dark green cypress pines. The cave floor is raised about a metre off the ground and is smooth, polished stone. I slept there when I was doing field research for The Rope Dancer. It’s a lovely clean place to camp, and if it rains you can light a fire at the lip of the cave and drink tea and watch the rain wash the dust off the leaves of the trees as magpies forage amongst the undergrowth. At night it becomes like Plato’s cave. The fire casts shadows on the rounded back wall, stretching proportions and creating bizarre silhouettes. Whenever I slept there, I had a recurrent dream: around the outside of the cave a group of spectral figures would sing clack sticks and dance all night. I couldn’t see them properly amongst the bush; they were shapes without proper form, and their singing and dancing would resonate through my dreams. The first time this happened, I awoke a number of times expecting to hear people camping nearby with some kind of beat-box. When I was fully awake, however, all there was was the sound of the wind in the trees and the pretty song of a willy-wagtail. As soon as I drifted off to sleep once more the singing would start up all over again. It wasn’t menacing; in fact, it gave my dreams a soft, welcoming feel, and in the morning I was always happy and refreshed.

You are no longer allowed to camp in the cave as it is now classified as a significant aboriginal site. When I told my story of the dreams to a Koori friend, she thought it obvious that the spirits of the Jardwadjali people, original inhabitants of Gariwerd, were at work. I am, however, constitutionally a sceptic. I simply don’t believe in the literal existence of the supernatural. At the same time, I cannot deny the chthonic tone of the dreams in the cave. My interpretation is that they show the power of place to affect the imagination and, specifically, the way the Australian bush affects my imagination. But then of course I went to Gariwerd with the intention of carrying out field research for The Rope Dancer, so at an unconscious level at least I was looking for, anticipating and perhaps therefore creating, interesting experiences to include in my writing. The answer, then, to the initial question about the relationship of place to writing is of course both: the natural world affects me so strongly that to make sense of the experience I turn to my writing and, at the same time, I seek out such experiences to provide material for my writing.
iv/ Field trips – Zarathustra in Kazakhstan

Perhaps I lack imagination, but I always prefer writing about things I know. At one level, this relates to my views on the novel – that is, that one of the novel’s roles is to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary. At another level, it relates to the pleasure I get from working imaginatively with the things around me. All of the main events in The Rope Dancer are fictional, but a good deal of the descriptive detail came directly from the field. I made trips to the casino, an outdoor dance party, to Derby Day and the employment agency in Prahran Central. The Chapter Six fishing scene I wrote after a friend took me marlin fishing out of Port Stevens. This was back in 2000 when I was still primarily focused on reading Nietzsche. At the time, I was mapping out plot structures and character profiles, and the marlin fishing was so invigorating that it struck me straight away as a sequence that could represent Rick’s emergence from isolation. That’s why Rick’s description in the fishing section is so full of colour and movement:

“He’s a little blackie,” Lars shouted.

But he wasn’t black. Shining slate blue on top, then lighter blue then silvery white underneath, smashing back into the water and then up again, three long leaps, glittering in the bright water like a creature of liquid metal in the cold bright jewel of the sea.

And there he was, glittering coppery-green, now turning pale blue as he came to the surface.

…The fish was bright metal grey, now glittering silver, with a rainbow-blue stripe glowing the length of its body…” (TRD p 107).

I wrote another fishing episode, this one set on Fraser Island. I based it on a fishing trip that I undertook early in 2003 and the aim was to juxtapose Rick’s passivity early in the novel with his greater assertiveness later on. This, however, was one of the darlings I had to murder.

The two major field trips I undertook were to research mountaineering. One was to New Zealand and the other was to Kazakhstan and they both provided strong stimulus to the writing instinct. The sublime beauty of the mountains and the awe-inspiring power of the elements give a practical course in existential reality. If you ever forget your insignificance in the world, then being caught in a mountain storm, or narrowly missed by an avalanche as I was near Mount Cook – when my climbing partner shouted “Fucking hell! Run!” and I looked up to see blocks of ice tumbling towards me – is a strong reminder. As much as providing stimulation, the value of the mountaineering trips was in the detail provided. One of the problems that non-mountaineer novelists face is the risk or errors in detail. Audrey Salkeld and Rosie Smith note the following:

To the novelist, mountaineering offers no shortage of plots. Tension, drama, triumph, tragedy, romance and intrigue can be permuted in endless variation and set into extravagant landscapes. This is something non-mountaineering authors have always recognized. Any number of thrillers have been based on the North Wall of the Eiger; manhunts conducted over icy passes; secret missions dispatched to remote Himalayan frontiers. But all too often, entertaining though these may be, such stories ring false to the mountaineer-reader. Some element of first-hand authenticity seems lacking, or the action slips too easily into melodrama…The successful mountaineering story has to be a successful story first, and on top of that be totally convincing to mountaineers. If not written by a person who is him or herself a climber, it has to be by someone in full tune and sympathy with mountaineers, someone who enjoys their uninhibited confidence and who is prepared to undergo total immersion in the subject (Salkeld & Smith 1990, pp.7-8).

It’s not that I want climbers to be my only or even my main audience but, by immersing myself in the practical aspects of mountaineering, I’m confident of the authenticity of the mountaineering in The Rope Dancer.

In mid 2001 I travelled to Kazakhstan with the help of a Deakin University research grant. The trip was a great success. It was at times hard work and I did get a little sick, but it was also thoroughly enjoyable. I spent two weeks in Almaty, the main city of Kazakhstan, and two weeks at Mount Khan Tengri base camp. I climbed a small way up the mountain, but developed mild altitude sickness and returned to base camp with my tail firmly between my legs. In the early stages of the planning of The Rope Dancer, I had searched around for an appropriate location. I needed a mountain that was high enough to cause serious altitude sickness, and remote enough to make rescue and body recovery difficult. The main Himalayan peaks are well worn in literature and ideally I wanted somewhere more unusual. After a good deal of reading, I came across Khan Tengri, The Lord of Spirits, also known as Bloody Mountain, in the Tien Shan, or Celestial Mountains. It’s a big mountain in an obscure location with an interesting name. Just what I wanted. Originally I planned an expedition to Khan Tengri from Kirghistan, but then I read that a number of climbers have perished on the south side as a result of the heavily avalanche-prone approach. Whilst I was committed to my novel, the thought of being buried under thousands of tonnes of snow and ice was somehow unappealing.

Though the amount of space in The Rope Dancer given directly to Khan Tengri is relatively small, the mountain sits in the foreground of the novel. Rick is initially trapped by the physical and psychological legacy of his accident on the mountain three years before. Khan Tengri then provides the location for the crisis of the novel. When Sara disappears high on Khan Tengri, the existential message is made clear: we all die cold and alone in a godless universe. The challenge is to create meaning in a life built on that foundation of despair. Photographs can show the beauty of Khan Tengri, but they can’t convey its physical presence. The mountain is huge. When I arrived, an avalanche was thundering down the black north-face, a white waterfall of snow. The orange marble pyramid stood proudly on its fluted icy ridges, and a summit cloud shone like a halo in the brilliant blue sky. Base camp, situated on dirty, grey moraine, is a wasteland, like another planet compared to the alpine meadows from where the helicopter takes off. I’m still in communication with a gold-toothed Russian mountaineer whose wife was the cook. She wore knee-length leather boots with high heels despite the uneven ground. I know how Khan Tengri base camp works, and something about the mountain itself, its conditions and moods, tales of drama, bravery and disaster, and even the local ghost stories: “Maybe true, maybe not true,” said Dimitri, the base camp doctor, after telling me the story of the Black Climber. “Better you believe.”

I ate garlic and carrot salad, hard-boiled eggs and sala, which is raw pig fat, with onions. I felt and heard the deep, dull twang as the whole glacier shifted. The Inilchek Glacier, the Little Prince, had seemed so quiet when I arrived and the helicopter had taken off, but was really noisy and alive, as if with a personality of its own. Rivers of melt-water hurried through it and a waterfall had cut deep into the ice behind camp. The wind sometimes howled like a dog in the wires of the radio aerial and violently flapped my tent doors. Other times at night there was whispering; snow falling on the canvas was a quiet voice in my dreams.

From up at Camp One, the highest I made it on the mountain, the glacier curled below, a giant frozen river a couple of kilometres wide, carving its way down the valley and out of sight. There I watched the choughs riding the wind currents, ascending or descending huge distances without flapping their wings. They made pleasant squeaking calls and purring replies. Then three ravens arrived and the choughs disappeared. The ravens would fly slowly towards a rock wall high up on Khan Tengri’s flank. When they came close the draft would blast them upwards. After a few seconds, the updraft would spit them out and they’d tumble though the air flapping spastically until finally regaining control. Then one of them flew down out of sight and returned a while later with something in its mouth. It looked like a small twig, though where it would have come from I can’t imagine. Another game began. The raven holding the stick would fly in slow circles while the other two dive-bombed it until it dropped the stick, then they would all dive after the stick. One of them would catch it in mid air and fly back up and begin circling.

These descriptions show how much of the detail in The Rope Dancer comes directly from my research trip, but of course much more failed to make it into the final version of the novel. For example, Almaty is a fascinating city still in the throes of the shift from Soviet rule to independence. The heavy hand of Communism may have lifted from Kazakhstan, but its imprint is still strong. In Almaty, you can’t have a mushroom and tomato omelette. The menu says mushroom omelette and tomato omelette, but it doesn’t say you can have both vegetables in the same dish. The openness and warmth of the Kazaks was a stark contrast to the total insanity of rules at border crossings. It is a country of extremes, where beautiful alpine valleys are set against the desolation of the steppes. In Almaty, everybody has a mobile phone but, as soon as you are out of the city, draft animals are the main source of transport. Almost all of the material about Rick and Sara’s time in Almaty and travelling through Kazakhstan failed to end up in the novel. It weighed down the plot and once again I had to murder things I liked.
v/ Iga Warta–Place, Story and the Search for Belonging

A little while ago I was talking to an aborigine called Terry Coulthard, a member of the Adnyamathanha group, which means “hill or rock people”, at a place called Iga Warta, the “Place of the Native Orange”, in the northern Flinders Ranges. In response to his questioning I tried, with some trepidation since I was talking to a man whose family had lived in the area for fifty or sixty thousand years, or forever, depending on whose creation myth you believed, to put into words how I felt about the Australian bush. I was born in the UK, but the English countryside, though pretty, doesn’t move me; it doesn’t have the ancient power of the Australian landscape. Coulthard, instead of being offended or laughing at my attempted explanation, excitedly told me a Muda creation story. (Coulthard’s family hate the term “dreaming” as it points to something past, something insubstantial and inconsequential; it denies the living reality of their mythology. Out of deference, I won’t repeat the Muda story itself. See Appendix 2 for the email exchange relating to this.) Without going into details, Coulthard’s Muda told of humankind’s creation in the Flinders Ranges, and then the diaspora that followed.

“Welcome home!” Terry Coulthard said, shaking my hand with genuine warmth. “You feel at home because you are home. That’s why so many people want to come to Australia,” he continued. “In troubled times every animal heads for home.”

The Adnyamathanha’s Muda is more than a simple story, more than an oral history; it is an explanation of the land, its formations, animal habits, rules for human conduct and much else besides. It’s an example that illustrates how important narrative is to aborigines as a means of not only describing, but also of defining, their relationship to the landscape. Story is integral to their sense of place.

To be a non-aborigine and to love the Australian bush is to experience tension – either the tension of denial as One Nation supporters evince even whilst “stridently asserting their own belonging” (Plumwood 2002b, p.354), or a real anxiety at crimes committed and current issues not addressed. The love of the bush that many of us feel is inevitably juxtaposed with the question of whether non-indigenes do belong, and the issue is there regardless of which side of the so-called “history wars” is preferred. In the essay that accompanies her novel, The Alphabet of Light and Dark, Danielle Wood (2003) describes her feeling for Tasmania: “It was physically, almost painfully intense and it seemed to demand to be written about. If The Alphabet of Light and Dark can be read as a novel length answer to a question, then that question is ‘How can I describe the feeling I have in this place?’” (p178). Wood wrestles with the problem of loving the Australian landscape “immoderately”, and yet being acutely conscious of the horrific treatment of the Tasmanian aborigines. She wonders whether it is possible to offer anything new, and whether in the end her novel “…is anything more than another text which clumsily entrenches divisions where it sought to open up new spaces” (p.218). Wood concludes with the modest hope that, by telling a story of characters with mixed European and aboriginal ancestry, some new territory has been created (p.218). Wood’s concern is one that all modern writers must at least be aware of when exploring any kind of intimacy with the Australian landscape. This is true even with novels such as The Rope Dancer that contain no explicitly aboriginal content. I am motivated to write by the power of the Australian bush, but I have to be aware of the fact that aborigines no longer live in the places where Rick and Sara climb and walk.

Peter Read, in his book Belonging – Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (2003), argues that non-aboriginal Australians have to create their own means of belonging. We can’t adopt or appropriate aboriginal ways of making sense of our relationship to the land and so we shouldn’t try. We need to respect aboriginality and the rights and needs of aborigines, but then create a parallel and independent way of articulating our love of the land. He says:

Leave the spirits to the people who made them or were made by them. Let the rest of us find the confidence in our own physical and spiritual belonging in this land, respectful of Aboriginality but not necessarily close to it. Let’s intuit our own attachments to country independently of Aboriginals. We can belong in the landscape, on the landscape, or irrelevantly to the landscape. We don’t all have to belong to each other (p.204).

Ours is, Read says, a conflicted relationship with the land, one of love and abuse. We love the land as we ruin it, and therefore our relationship can never be like that of the aborigines. This doesn’t mean, however, that non-indigenes are barred from developing a sense of belonging. By understanding our history, we can be “enriched by the sites of evil as well as good” (p.223) and, through this process, reach a personal and deeply meaningful way of belonging. “There are as many routes to belonging as there are non-Aboriginal Australians to find them” (p.223). Read’s book, consisting of a series of interviews where people tell stories about their relationship to the landscape, illustrates the importance of narrative as a route to belonging and as a way of making sense of land culture and place relationships. Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood has reservations about Read’s very personal approach to belonging. Plumwood argues that Australia needs a broad structural reorientation to the landscape if an improved land relationship is to develop. Where Plumwood is similar to Read is in recognising the value of story in the creation of healthier sense of place. She says:

Without the richness of narratives and narrative subjects that define and elaborate place, the connection between our lived experience and our sense of space and time is reduced, and life lacks immediacy, becomes flat, impersonal and placeless (Plumwood 2002b, p.231).

In “Belonging, Naming, and Decolonisation”, Plumwood suggests that one step towards this is to reconsider our naming practices with their “underlying narratives of eurocentrism” (Plumwood 2002b, p.369). She goes on, “If we want a meaningful relationship with the land that expresses a healthier pattern than the colonial one, we have to look to naming it in meaningful terms that acknowledge agency and narrative depth” (p.369). Thus, for Plumwood, story is crucially connected to the aim of situating ourselves as ecological beings and thus achieving the goal of becoming more “place-sensitive” (p.232).

What is common in the different thoughts of Coulthard, Wood, Plumwood and Read is the central importance of story telling as a way of relating to place. This is not a peculiarly Australian phenomenon. David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) ranges all over the globe in search of better ways of connecting the human body to the natural world. It emerges that story and a sense of place are frequently related. Abram says:

Storytelling is a primary form of human speaking, a mode of discourse that continually weds the human community to the land. [In the stories of the Western Apache, for example]…narratives express a deep association between moral behavior and the land and, when heard, are able to effect a lasting kinship between persons and particular places.

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language (p.163).

As a new Australian, who has only been in the country for three decades, what am I to do? I was very moved at Terry Coulthard’s inclusive gesture, his welcoming of me home, but his Muda are not my Muda, and to try to adopt aboriginal mythology would be at best mimicry and at worst appropriation. Even the more recent stories of non-indigenes who have colonised and settled the land are not my stories. And yet my feelings towards the Australian landscape are amongst the strongest emotions I know. Like most Australians, I spend a lot of time in urban environs, but the bush is where I am most happy. I like to go where the aroma of eucalyptus is so strong, so exquisite, that it’s as if shafts of scent beam though the trees, where purple orchids bloom beside the track and brightly coloured grasshoppers, shining like blue and green jewels, jump around my legs; where flocks of black cockatoos whee-laa and squawk and flip through the branches, clowning about as if they are going to crash at any moment, and I like to swim in mountain streams that make me gasp for air and make my skin tingle and glow with energy. The Australian bush has a texture, a smell, a colour and a sound that make me feel whole. It is where I go to be myself; to escape the detrition of daily life; to heal. The Australian landscape is not, however, without its contradictions, not without a hint of dread in the sublime. When my partner and I were walking up around the Nigger Heads to take in the views of Feathertop’s east face, for a short while we followed separate paths and, when we met up half an hour or so later, we had both experienced the same sense of foreboding, a sinister and threatening presence. The scrub had seemed to close in around us and we’d both taken falls. I’d smacked my head on a tree stump giving my self a bad nosebleed. Nothing worse happened, but the ominous feeling only left when we dropped down off the rocky heads and down onto the main track. Similarly, the climbing amphitheatre at Falcon’s Lookout has a menacing atmosphere. My friends and I have had numerous small accidents there – sprained ankles, torn fingers and the like – and I have nearly been hit by a rock that fell from an unlikely place. The uncanny feeling at Werribee Gorge is so strong that I will no longer climb there.

I am a keen journal keeper, forever noting down things that happen, conversations overheard and people observed. I’m also an enthusiastic student of nature, always studying the animals, rocks and plants that I come across. I like to think that writing is a response to life, but the more I write the more it becomes integrated into my whole experience of life. Of course in recent years, The Rope Dancer has been constantly on my mind and most of the journeys I’ve made have been to research places for the novel. As a result, my journal is in many parts a mixture of fact and fiction, a synthesis of things I’ve seen and done and ideas being developed for The Rope Dancer. If someone read my journal, they would have a very distorted picture of what has happened to me over the last couple of years. There are differences between what occurred on my journeys and what I recorded: a blurring of memory and imagination. I’ve taken things that happened to me and some of my friends and adapted them, changed them in ways that often result in a completely different meaning. The aim is not to twist the facts and deform the truth, but rather to steal from life and fashion something new. This process of creation is part of the way I intuit my relationship to Australia. It’s hard to make sense of either the immoderate love I feel for the landscape, or the inkling of darkness that’s there in the landscape’s heart. It’s hard to make sense of these feelings because I have no story into which to place them. Thus I have to create my own story, my own mythology. A crucial aspect of The Rope Dancer is a personal desire to situate myself in place: to become wed to the land.
vi/ The Reciprocity of Place and Character

Place can be one of the factors that operates on characters to define and change them. Place, it’s worth pointing out, has not always been a significant part of fiction. David Lodge, himself a novelist and literary critic, comments that, “The sense of place was a fairly late development in the history of prose fiction…the cities of classical romance are interchangeable backcloths for the plot [and the] early English novelists were scarcely more specific about place” (Lodge 1992, p.57). To illustrate this, Lodge contrasts the relatively opaque London of Fielding’s Tom Jones, with the vibrant Jacob’s Island of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. ” Tom Jones was published in 1749; Oliver Twist in 1838. What intervened was the Romantic movement, which pondered the effect of milieu on man, opened people’s eyes to the sublime beauty of landscape and, in due course, to the grim symbolism of cityscapes in the Industrial Age” (pp.57-58). Lodge is right. Historically, poets have been more sensitive to the impact of place than prose writers whose interest has been focused on plot and character. Seamus Heaney asserts that Wordsworth was the first to articulate the nurturing that becomes available to a character through place. Heaney says:

In his narrative poem, ‘Michael’, he [Wordsworth] talks at one point about the way the Westmoreland mountains were so much more than a picturesque backdrop for his shepherd’s existence, how they were rather companionable and influential in the strict sense of the word ‘influential’ – things flowed in from them to Michael’s psychic life. This Lake District was not inanimate stone but active nature, humanized and humanizing…(Heaney 1980, p.145).

Following the lead of the romantics, place has become a bigger part of novelists’ repertoires, and it does a number of things – it can define character, provoke change and be integral to the process of self-realisation.

Place can define character by acting as an extended metaphor. This is what Welty means when she says that place has a good deal to do with making characters real. The place they exist in, are happy or unhappy in, reveals a great deal about the characters themselves. At the start of The Rope Dancer, Rick’s confinement is represented by the place he lives in – the “chook-shed”. Accompanied by rats, worms and slugs, Rick’s physical and psychological degeneration is given material form by his surrounds. Too scared to live and too scared to die, Rick exists on the margin, unable either to escape his past or create a future. The others are similarly defined by place: Cat is happiest in a place populated by celebrities; for Sara, it “didn’t matter if she was in the bush or in the city, studying people or trees, hobnobbing with high society or chatting with the hoi polloi” (TRD p.76), Sara’s love of life meant she was wed to place everywhere. Thus place is a development of the pathetic fallacy, a way of representing characters through the way they engage in the world.

A character must be animated in order to grow, and it is the people, objects, memories and so forth – the contents of place – that provoke the character and so stimulate change. In The Rope Dancer, natural places are crucial to Rick’s character development. Activities like climbing, hiking and fishing, with their strong bodily involvement in the physical world, are powerful antagonisers. The phenomenologist Edward Casey, in his Getting Back Into Place (1998), emphasises how the natural world encourages an engagement in place. He says:

Wilderness actively solicits bodily movement, indeed, wild places require the body’s intervention, sometimes for the sake of sheer survival. We cannot doubt that the lived body gets fully engaged by wilderness. This body becomes the world which it walks (p.259).

An activity like climbing is particularly well designed to facilitate an engagement with place. A climber has to move on nature’s terms. If there isn’t a handhold for the right hand then he or she will have to work out how to climb without one. A climber is intimate with the texture of the rock under the fingertips, with the sound of the wind, the smell of sweat mixed with dirt, a lizard moving across vertical ground as if immune to gravity, the rock crystals close to the face, and the sheer physical pull of the earth. Through the senses, climbers are bodily involved and if they don’t move in sympathy with the features of the cliff then it will spit them off. There is a literal reciprocity between climber and cliff: hands and feet change, if microscopically, the features of the rock; scraped knuckles and barked knees leave blood and skin for bacteria and other organisms to eat. On reaching a ledge, the climber can sit and look out at the world, shifting from a concentration on the minute to a contemplation of the vast. When Sara draws Rick out into the world again, it is through engagement with nature that Rick begins to rebuild himself. On the first climbing trip with Sara, Rick is terrified, but slowly the power of place begins to work on him:

There were sheer corners and narrow chimneys, big ledges and an overhanging nose, steep cracks and airy traverses. The climbing became totally absorbing. Reach, feel the hold, adjust your weight, step with one foot, now the other, adjust your balance, reach for the next hold – nothing mattered, nothing existed other than the rock in front of my face. The world was in sharp focus and everything was connected (TRD p.71).

Rick’s reconnecting with the world is not without the trauma of rebirth, but it leads Rick to a totally new appreciation of the natural world. Previously, when Rick had been climbing seriously with Rory, the bush was just something that he’d had to walk through to get to the cliffs, but “[b]eing there with Sara made it seem interesting and alive” (TRD p.95). Thus Sara draws Rick out into natural places, and the places in turn bring about change and development in Rick’s character.

Place, by confronting the individual and eliciting change, is important in the process of character self-realisation. As characters come to know important things about themselves – or perhaps in significant ways fail to do so – place is crucial in the struggle for self-knowledge. As Heaney says: “to know who you are, you have to have a place to come from” (Heaney 1980, p.135). J.E. Malpas, in Place and Experience – A Philosophical Topography (1999) , explores the phenomenological implications of a sense of place. He argues that fiction can illustrate the gaining of personal identity through experiencing place. To illustrate, this Malpas develops what he calls “Proust’s Principle”. In Remembrance of Things Past, the search for lost time is a search for lost place. This is more than just a “nostalgic recollection”, but a “recovery and reclamation”, and in “this recovery of time and place, Marcel’s own life is recovered also” (Malpas 1999, p.160). Malpas makes much of the passage in Remembrance of Things Past where the narrator says, as could Proust of the novel itself:

I would therein describe men – even should that give them the semblance of monstrous creatures – as occupying in Time a place far more considerable than the so restricted one allotted to them in space, a place, on the contrary, extending boundlessly since, giant-like, reaching far back into the years, they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives – with countless intervening days between – so widely separated from one another in time (p.162).

Malpas says that “Proust often writes, in fact, as if he thinks of persona as tied to places in some such basic fashion – not just as remembered only in relation to place, but as being who and what they are through their inhabiting of particular places and their situation within particular locations…[In Remembrance of Things Past] Marcel’s identity is inextricably tied to the places and spaces in which his life has been lived such that the recovery of self can only take the form of a recovery of place – both a recovery of specific places as well as the recovery of an encompassing ‘place’ within which his life can be grasped as a whole” (p.176). Thus, according to Malpas’s enunciation of “Proust’s Principle”, via the agency of memory a character can grasp place and, through this process, undergo an epiphany of self-realisation.

The impact of place, particularly wilderness, is something that I am interested in exploring in my fiction. In my first novel, The World As It Is (1998), the main character, Michael, goes through a number of revelatory experiences brought about through contact with wild places . In the first, Michael is sleeping on the beach:

I elongated the fire till it was almost as long as me, then built another one a few meters from the first and lay down between the two. The night was overcast and it was warm between the fires. The flames shifted in the light breeze and the coals glowed deep orange. The waves sounded loud and strong, and the incoming tide brought them closer and made them louder.

Under the low sky, between the two fires, outside became inside and my mind stilled and for a while I wasn’t there at all and for the first time in my life I felt absolutely safe (p.55).

A second mystical experience occurs after an intense solo climber episode:

I must have sat on the cliff edge for an hour, rubbing my aching arms and sucking on my bleeding fingertips…I looked east, out over the Blue Ranges, and north towards Lake Eildon, out over Blackwood flat to Knobby Spur, and wondered that the world existed at all. I might have been the only person alive, and inside became outside and I ceased to exist, or else I was everything (p.153).

In The Rope Dancer, I aimed to give the impact of place a more terrestrial nature. Sara helps Rick in the initial stages of his recovery, but ultimately he has to go alone into the wilderness in order to fully reinvent himself. It is on his walk through the Australian Alps that Rick finally comes to take personal responsibility for his life and, further than that, take some responsibility for those around him, specifically Sara in her time of need. On his unaccompanied walk, Rick develops sensitivity to place that gives him an inkling of the chthonic power of the Australian landscape. Within this is also a vision of the potential for destructiveness within the beauty of nature. Rick’s narration of the novel occurs from the place of his ancestors, or at least as close, as a white Australian, as he can get to that. Rick is ambiguous about returning to his birthplace to live with his doting mother and dreadful sister. Does this represent a move whereby he can get his life into perspective, or is it a running away in the face of a defeat? As Rick goes through his journals, trying to give meaning to events, the Wimmera, “where from a small vantage point you can see clear to the horizon”, is a metaphor for his attempt to find a place from where to view the sweep of his life with clarity. The status of Rick’s self-realisation at the end of the novel is deliberately uncertain. The hardest struggle is still ahead of him.
vii/ Conclusion

Place is a powerful thing: it has the capacity to motivate the author, impart raw materials for the creation of story, and it also provides means for the representation and change of fictional characters. There is obviously a strong parallel here between the impact of place on real and on invented people. David Abram observes:

Yet there remains another reason for the profound association between storytelling and the more-than-human terrain. It resides in the encompassing, enveloping wholeness of a story in relation to the characters that act and move within it. A story envelopes its protagonists much as we ourselves are enveloped by the terrain. In other words, we are situated in the land in much the same way that characters are situated in a story (Abram 1996, p.163).

A phenomenological definition of place – place as a complex concept that exists not independently of its elements, but as a product of the interaction of those elements; place as the intersection point where subject and object, space and time, intersubjective experience and social forces cohere – fits with the idea that place and character have a special intimacy in fiction. Such a view of place, with its emphasis on the reciprocity of perceiver and the perceived, works well with climbing fiction, where the world affects the character through the body, and the character affects the world through bodily contact with it. Jeffrey McCarthy has carried out a phenomenological study of place and climbing non-fiction in his paper, “A theory of place in North American mountaineering” (2002). It would be interesting to see what applying phenomenology to place in climbing fiction would reveal. The earlier discussion of One Green Bottle and Solo Faces pointed out elements of this. A worthwhile task for future analysis would be to take a broad sample of climbing fiction and see how place operates, how it represents and develops characters and themes. Having looked in this chapter at the influence of place on character, now seems a good time to turn and focus intently on character itself as an aspect of the novel.
Chapter FOUR
Character and Hero

To give style to one’s character – a great and rare art! He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weaknesses delight the eye.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The involuntary nature of image, of metaphor is the most remarkable thing of all: one no longer has any idea what is image, what metaphor, everything presents itself as the readiest, the truest, the simplest means of expression.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
i/ Introduction

Character is intimately connected with plot, setting, theme and all the other components of fiction, and it is also perhaps the most animate aspect of a novel. As Graham Greene says: “The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him” (Greene in Clines 1985). Despite the fact that characters are obviously a construct, and despite the habit of readers who often look to the author’s life to “see who these people really are”, authors continually report that the more “real” the characters become, the more likely they are to go their own way in the story. Fictional characters come from deep in our imagination and the sense that we don’t always control them is no more surprising than the realisation that we don’t control many aspects of our unconscious. The psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall makes the following observation:

Each of us harbors in our inner universe a number of ‘characters,’ parts of ourselves that frequently operate in complete contradiction to one another, causing conflict and mental pain to our conscious selves. For we are relatively unacquainted with these hidden players and their roles. Whether we will it or not, our inner characters are constantly seeking a stage on which to play out their tragedies and comedies. Although we rarely assume responsibility for our secret theatre productions, the producer is seated in our own minds (McDougall 1982, pp.3-4).

McDougall’s main concern is the way that the repression of these inner characters leads them to play out their tragedies and comedies through psychosomatic conditions. Another theatre for these characters to express themselves in is made available when the author sets them free in fiction. The inner world is given form by the organising power of the unconscious and characters come to life in the novel. Nevertheless, characters are not completely self-seeding: they do require some cultivation. Even though in reality this is a messy and organic process, for heuristic purposes this chapter identifies three different aspects of character development in The Rope Dancer: first, individuals in Nietzsche’s life suggested the initial people for characters in the novel; second, The Great Gatsby lent some form and structure to these amorphous and somewhat chaotic ideas; third, Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey helped organise the interplay of plot and character, this last being specifically relevant to Rick’s development.
ii/ Nietzsche’s People

The Rope Dancer is populated by characters that are inspired by, but who are not imitations of, people in Nietzsche’s life. Ideas for Lou, for example, came from Louise Salome. She is the woman holding the whip in the famous photograph of Nietzsche in horse-harness, and the woman Nietzsche proposed to in 1882. Salome was by all accounts an extraordinary person: intelligent, independent and one of the first practising psychologists in an era when females were rare in any of the professions. “Lou was an immensely gifted woman, who went on to become Rilke’s mistress and later one of Freud’s most valued disciples; he pays tribute to her in uncharacteristically generous terms for her discoveries in the area of anal eroticism” (Tanner 1994, p.58). Sara’s husband, Michael, with his Dionysian insight into life, represents Silenus as found in The Birth of Tragedy; Rory Wilde comes from Richard Wagner and Cat from Cosima; Rick is Nietzsche himself and Sara is of course Zarathustra. At different times all of the main characters are voice pieces for Nietzsche’s ideas. Even Rory gets his chance when, for example, towards the end of the novel he says: “What kids haven’t had cause to complain about their parents?” (Zarathustra says: “Laugh not at such marriages! What child hath not had reason to weep over its parents?” (Nietzsche 1883-5, p.96).)

A major problem presented itself in the early work on The Rope Dancer – how to combine ideas from Thus Spake Zarathustra with a realistic climbing story. Sara was the original choice for narrator, and a first person point of view was important as this linked with two central themes: one, that any story is someone’s own particular version of events; and two, the importance of constructing the events of your life as if you had willed them in order to be able to deal with the absurdity of the human condition. How could a narrator, who spoke in the prophetic manner of Zarathustra, maintain the realism that was important to the sense of place and the drama that was so important to the climbing scenes? In the end, after numerous false starts, I accepted that it wasn’t possible. Experiments with shifting points of view yielded unsatisfactory results and for a while no viable alternatives presented themselves. I dealt with this problem by ignoring it, continuing with my work on Nietzsche, researching Derby Day, dance parties, high-altitude cerebral oedema and so on. Then an idea came. An intermediary character could narrate Sara’s story, thus avoiding the bombast and hyperbole of the original Zarathustra. Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, with his infatuation for Jay Gatsby, suggested itself as a model. This would distance the narration from Zarathustra and so allow for Nietzschean ideas to be introduced with less self-consciousness. As Rick was influenced by Nick Carraway and Sara by Jay Gatsby, so Rory was affected by Tom Buchanan, Cat by Daisy and Lou by Jordan Baker. In the end, I borrowed a great deal from Fitzgerald’s book, a debt I was determined to signal early in the novel, hence the lines:

My few friends have tended towards being, shall we say, intense. This has led to accusations that I’m a voyeur, some kind of Nick Carraway living my life through the Jay Gatsbys of the world. That’s not fair, but it’s true that it takes a lot for people to excite me (TRD p.1).

The use of The Great Gatsby (1926) was a significant intermediary step early in the conception of the novel and its characters. It is important to emphasise the organic processes at work here. The Rope Dancer is not a novel about Nietzsche’s life, or in some way about The Great Gatsby. I was making up a story and being influenced from many different directions, picking up and discarding ideas as necessitated by the demands of the novel itself.

As The Rope Dancer matured as a piece of fiction, so too the characters became increasingly independent. Lou, for example, ended up going very much in her own direction. The slightly “wounded” personality in The Rope Dancer, with her human pity that seems to be a mask for self-hatred and manipulative tendencies, is very different from the Louise Salome prototype. Some of this was a result of deliberate decisions on my part. As the story matured, Lou had to become a less genial character in order to keep reader sympathy with Rick. There were other instances, however, where Lou went her own way. For example, Lou’s drinking developed over successive drafts without my planning it. She just seemed to want to drink heavily and so I let her. Sara says, in that fateful interview: “A novel, its characters for example, is as much a creation of the reader’s skill as the writer’s” (TRD p.162). Initially, a character is no more than the collection of qualities the author gives to her or him. The reader then enters the game and creates a whole person, albeit as a psychological entity. As Lou evolved into a more “damaged” person, inevitably I gave thought as to why she behaved the way she did. Was she, for instance, abused as a child? I could have filled in these gaps but, apart from not wanting to clutter the novel with too many abused people, it’s important to give the reader space for the creative act of reading.
iii/ Rick Takes Over

All of the characters changed over time and the biggest shift was Rick’s appropriation of the novel itself. Rick sounds closest to my own voice, but he is as much a construct as any of the others. As with Lou, the final version of Rick is very different to the original. Unlike the retiring Nick Caraway, Rick, once given the reigns of narration, gradually took over the novel until it became his story. As a result of my interest in myth and symbol, I was familiar with Joseph Campbell’s work long before I embarked on The Rope Dancer. Campbell’s well-known The Hero With a Thousand Faces draws heavily on the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud, Jung, and others, and links depth psychology to the timeless symbols common in mythology (Campbell 1949, p.255). This was always ticking away in my unconscious, informing the plot structure of The Rope Dancer, and also suggesting ideas for character development. Rick’s journey is from a Socratic narrow mindedness to a more Dionysian and insightful understanding of life. One particular problem was the positioning of Rick’s biography. This was important for the creation of him as a “real” person, and it also tied in with the character’s need for reconciliation with his father. The theme of dying alone was always going to be represented by Sara’s fate, but increasingly it connected with Rick’s childhood. Many of the details of Rick’s biography are adaptations from Nietzsche’s life – his being the progeny of a line of Lutheran ministers, being brought up by aunts and mother and sister, some of the details from the university years and so on. The early death of Nietzsche’s father was the most important event in his life and, the more Rick took over The Rope Dancer, the more significant this became in the novel. There were quite a few happy coincidences in the imaginative synthesis of Rick and Nietzsche. For example, the symptoms of Nietzsche’s illnesses fitted well with Rick suffering from the legacy of cerebral oedema.

When the final decision to shift the focus of the novel from Sara to Rick was made, the problem of how to present Rick’s biography presented itself. After ruminating on this for a while, I gave up on the problem and turned my mind to other things, once again hoping the unconscious would work it out. Then one day the concept of integrating Rick’s biography in reverse chronological order presented itself. Thus as Rick’s recollection moves forward through the year 1999/2000, his personal journey goes backwards into his childhood. The novel is Rick’s attempt to make sense of both his recent and distant past; the process of self-realisation involves making sense of his father’s death as well as Sara’s tragedy. The challenge wasn’t making Rick’s biography convincing, but rather insinuating it into the story without causing the novel to sag. I turned to The Hero With a Thousand Faces and used Campbell’s concept of a developmental journey to help create a sound plot and coherent character development. Campbell divides the hero’s journey into three main stages – Departure / Initiation / Return – and these are further subdivided in the following manner:

THE MONOMYTH – THE ADVENTURE OF THE HERO

DEPARTURE

The Call to Adventure

Refusal of the Call

Supernatural Aid

The Crossing of the First Threshold

The Belly of the Whale

INITIATION

The Road of Trials

The Meeting with the Goddess

Woman as Temptress

Atonement with the Father

Apotheosis

The Ultimate Boon

RETURN

Refusal of the Return

The Magic Flight

Rescue from Without

The Crossing of the Return Threshold

Master of the Two Worlds

Freedom to Live

(Campbell 1949, pp. ix-x).

In all of these stages there is an inner and an outer dynamic at work: that is, a material problem for the hero to manage and a personal issue to deal with. The various phases are not concrete steps that once taken are always left behind, but stages that are dynamic and often recurrent. There may be specific points in a story where events reach a zenith or nadir, but the cyclic nature of life means that the sequence of development is repeated over and over. This is true, for example, as will be discussed later, of Rick’s atonement with his father. The Rope Dancer doesn’t follow Campbell’s structure step-by-step and indeed, as Campbell himself observes, the hero’s journey has infinite permutations:

The changes rung on the simple scale of the monomyth defy description. Many tales isolate and greatly enlarge upon one or two of the typical elements of the full cycle (test motif, flight motif, abduction of the bride), others string a number of independent cycles into a single series (as in the Odyssey). Differing characters or episodes can become fused, or a single element can reduplicate itself and reappear under many changes (Campbell 1949, p.246).

Campbell’s scheme was a useful way of organising ideas during the creative process, and likewise it can function as an exegetical device for exploring Rick’s character development.
Rick’s journey – Departure

The first part of The Rope Dancer fits well with the first stage of Campbell’s schema. Rick is provoked into changing, assisted when he hesitates, and experiences a kind of rebirth at the end of Chapter Four. “This first stage of the mythological journey…signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual centre of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown” (Campbell 1949, p.58). Rick’s summons to adventure was the phone call that ” came at the end of a cold Melbourne winter.” Rick was thirty-six – the same age at which his father had died, an event for which he’d never been able to forgive himself – and, in that winter of 1999, he was at the lowest point in his vitality ever. * Rick looks at the phone in dismay. The ringing is like an alarm bell, foreshadowing that if he picks up the receiver a dramatic series of events will unfold. Rick faces many difficulties, including physical ill health combined with a fractured sense of self and some deep-seated issues from the past. Despite the desperate circumstances in the rat-infested bungalow, Rick is reluctant to change. “Not interested,” he says when Rory initially outlines the project of teaching Sara Smith to climb. Even in his drunken state, Rick finds the thought of climbing again appalling. Rory, of course, isn’t interested in Rick playing the reluctant hero, and continues to bulldoze Rick into the project. Rory is, as always, self-serving, but his motives are not necessarily wholly negative; Rory is trying in his own unsubtle way to help Rick out of his predicament. This isn’t the only direction from which Rick experiences impetus to change; there is financial pressure, Lou’s promise of an escape from desperate loneliness, and the fact that Rick’s life appears to have reached its nadir. If he doesn’t take the chance to change, where will his life end up?

All these forces, however, and even Sara’s charm, are not enough to overcome Rick’s resistance to change. The vital extra component comes from Michael. Campbell observes that early in the hero-journey there is typically an encounter “…with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass” (Campbell 1949, p.69). For Rick, the mentor appears as a pale image drifting towards him in the darkness, finally “resolving itself into a gaunt face that seemed to float in the air” (TRD p.34). Michael gives Rick a suit to wear to the races, symbolically passing the mantle of being Sara’s partner on to Rick. Michael has chosen his successor, and is trying to groom him to be fit for the job. “You will look after Sara, won’t you?” Michael says quietly to Rick on New Year’s Eve. Michael is prepared to accept his fate. He has seen into the abyss, reconciled himself to it, and plans to die at the right time. The most important thing that Michael passes on is Silenus’s Dionysian insight. This can, of course, be interpreted pessimistically, but it is transformed by Michael’s zeal to live the life he has with authenticity and spirit, and the positive message is provided by Michael’s observation: “We have to do what we can, don’t we? Otherwise old Silenus was right.” This is Michael’s real gift, the gift of meaning, though it takes a while before Rick is prepared to grasp it.

A protagonist often struggles to take the first step on the journey and the experience can be accompanied by the agony of labour. “The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died” (Campbell 1949, p.90). Rick’s “Crossing the First Threshold” – Sara’s first climbing trip to Gariwerd – is replete with the psychosexual energy of creation and rebirth. For Rick, it’s like his first time again: “Painful, scary and absolutely thrilling”; and it’s also very nearly a disaster. Rick is way out of his depth and the migraine ensures it is an agonising experience.

I became aware I was moaning slightly though it sounded like someone else’s voice…Sara began massaging my temples, pressing rhythmically with her thumbs till it felt she was penetrating deep into my skull. Slowly the world came back. I could feel Sara’s warm breath on my face. I could smell her sweat. She smelled like the sea. I opened my eyes a sliver. She was kneeling between my legs, not looking at me, but past me or through me.

“Thanks,” I said. Sara helped me lie down. She put the rope under my head and I slept (TRD p.75).

Rick is reborn; he is a climber again, though of a different kind to before. Rick has returned to a world he knew and it now has fresh form and meaning. Rick’s crossing of this threshold was not so much of his own doing, but rather the result of the momentum of events. Without Sara there to assist the delivery, it could easily have been stillborn.
Rick’s journey – Initiation

Rick endures many ordeals on the way towards self-realisation. He needs to overcome not only his own physical limitations, but also deal with the social, psychological and emotional obstacles – some positive, some negative – that frequently threaten to disrupt his journey. “Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials” (Campbell 1949, p.97). There “will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land” (p.109). Rick’s sense of self is confronted by being unable to do a single chin-up in the chookshed, and initially being incapable of walking around the block more than six times. All this is made poignant by the memory of how strong he once was. At university, Rick went to the gym six times a week and, when he took up climbing, exercise was a kind of religious substitute, complete with cleansing diets and a physical regime that resembled self-mortification more than a training schedule. It takes a long time, but Rick ultimately reconciles himself to the fact he will never again physically be the man he once was, and finally he summons the courage to recreate himself:

The trips away before Christmas, the NZ trip and who knows, maybe even dancing all night at the rave, had helped me get into some kind of shape without realising it…I’d never be as good as I once was. That wasn’t the point. Rock climbing, fishing and dancing were fun, but they were no substitute for the real thing. And if I was going to live dangerously I wanted it to be in the mountains, not the back alleys of drug use. Some personalities are more addictive than others. It’s worth taking your limitations seriously (TRD p.156).

By this stage Michael is dead, Sara is incapacitated by grief and it’s clear that, if Rick doesn’t start to take charge of his own life, then only disaster can follow. Rick’s fanatical training as a young man was an Apollonian drive for physical perfection; as an older man, it is more to do with a psychological reconstruction of a life worth living.

More subtle, but in many ways harder for Rick, are the social and emotional trials he faces. These include Lou’s volatility, Cat’s pretentiousness and Duncan’s posturing. Likewise Rory’s behaviour, perhaps once amusing, or at least bearable, becomes increasingly intolerable. These characters are representatives of various kinds of cultural decadence that Nietzsche railed against so virulently. Rick’s challenge is to negotiate these obstacles successfully. In mythology, when many of the tests and enemies have been overcome, there is often a literal or figurative marriage. This is sometimes a symbolic woman – to know her is to know life, to master life. This “Queen Goddess of the World” represents the hero’s mature grip on life: a union with the world; a grasp of the beauty and mystery of life (Campbell 1949, p.109). The Goddess in The Rope Dancer is obviously Sara. This is not just because of her beauty, strength and intelligence. She is the archetypal earth-mother: she knows the names of the plants and animals; she understands the history of the rocks; she’s sensitive to the chthonic power of the landscape. Sara is a female Shaman. “Did you see lots of animals?” Michael asks Rick after the first trip to Gariwerd. “You always see lots of animals when you go out with Sara.” And, of course, Rick does see lots of animals when he’s with Sara. His journal becomes full of encounters with echidnas, snakes and lizards. Sara engages Rick with the natural world in a way that opens his eyes to the beauty of life. It even makes him, for the first time in his life, contemplate parenting. In mythology, this step in maturity is sometimes given the emblem of androgyny. High up on Khan Tengri, Rick’s oxygen-starved unconscious projects this deep symbolism:

I slipped in and out of consciousness with dreams merging into my waking mind. Hypoxia does strange things to your brain. For much of the time I thought Sara was there with me. We made love in a slow, never-ending cycle, our bodies so intertwined it became impossible to tell one from the other. At one stage of the dreaming I became Sara, though she was still there, and I was pregnant with her child (TRD p.193).

Rick is pregnant with Sara’s message: a final grasp of the beauty of life is about to be revealed in tragedy. The unanswered question is whether Rick has the strength to cope.

In opposition to the meeting with the Goddess, there is the encounter with the “Woman as Temptress”. As with the “Queen Goddess of the World”, this woman is symbolic. In myth, she may be represented as a literal woman and the temptation is sexual lust, but metaphorically she is much more than that: she is the whole gamut of earthy, worldly needs and desires. These draw the hero away from the quest and threaten to bring the hero back to the ordinary world without having completed the journey. A challenge for the hero is how to cope with the “…the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell” (Campbell 1949, p.121). Lou is initially a positive force in Rick’s life. She helps him though his convalescence and she encourages Rick’s involvement in the Wilde Adventures project. Lou’s sexual appetite is exciting for Rick, and his relationship with her, though an emotional roller-coaster ride, does help bring him out of himself and reconnect him to the physical world. Later on, however, Lou’s influence is more negative. Rick tries to engage Lou in the natural world as Sara has done for him, but Lou isn’t interested. Perhaps understandably, Lou begins to become jealous of Rick’s obsession with Sara. Lou also becomes frustrated with Rick’s inability to arrange his life along sensible lines. When Rick tells Lou of his plans to go to New Zealand, she is furious:

A few nights later Lou stayed at the chook-shed for the second time. The next morning she looked very seedy, and her hair stank of cigarette smoke. When I told her about Michael’s offer, she swung her legs out of bed.

“That’s just stupid,” she said angrily, pulling up her tights. “Fuck!” A big ladder ran all the way from her foot to her hip.

“I thought you’d be pleased.”

“It’s just stupid,” Lou said, yanking on her dress. “Why don’t you ever say no when someone asks you to do something?”

I protested that she had encouraged me to get involved in the project at the start.

“Look at this dive you live in. Why don’t you grow up and get a job?” And then she was gone, slamming the door as she left (TRD p.116).

Of course, Lou does have a point, and quite a good one. Maybe a sensible person would avoid mountaineering altogether. Rick is in his late thirties and not fully recovered from a serious accident. Maybe he should get a real job and live a normal life, become a useful factor of production in the global economy. And then maybe not.

Meeting the Goddess and the Temptress represents an engagement with the richness of life. By reaching “Atonement with the Father”, the hero comes to understand that the “sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being” (Campbell 1949, p.147). Having grown up fatherless, Rick unconsciously searches for substitute father figures to provide him with direction. Rory offers this for a while, but then lets Rick down, first on the slopes of Khan Tengri, later through his boorish behaviour, and then, lastly, in his failure on the final expedition. Michael and Sara are in turn father figures for Rick, offering him support and wisdom though they, too, as all fathers eventually must, pass out of his life. This a crucial aspect of the “Atonement with the Father” phase: the hero must grow up, become properly independent and take on a paternal role himself. Rick is not quick to accept responsibility, frequently vacillating and trying to back out of situations that demand it, but events develop their own momentum and Rick is forced by people and circumstances to grow up. There are many messages for Rick in Michael’s death, none more important than that a mentor can’t be there forever. The terrifying dream Rick has on his walk in the Alps is his unconscious telling him he cannot forever remain a child. Rick has to risk the plunge and set about recreating his life on his own terms. This is what he realises up on the high plains, and why the walking trip finishes with a ritual baptism:

Lower down the sound of rushing water became strong and then the path forded a river where there were some big granite boulders to hop across. The tea-coloured water churned and gushed across the track, split into streams and dropped into torrid natural spas.

It was a hot afternoon and I was begrimed with the sweat and grit of a week’s walk. I undressed and tested the water with my foot. It was brutally cold and I hesitated, trying to summon the courage to brave the icy water. What was it Michael had said to me back in August? ” We have to do what we can…Otherwise old Silenus is right.”

I jumped in, breathing heavily, panting and thrashing around, my ears hurting, feeling like shouting out from the cold, and quickly climbed out, frantically rubbing myself with a T-shirt. Then, when I was dry, my skin began to tingle, as if I was covered in static electricity, as if I was glowing with energy, and it felt so good I had to plunge in again (TRD p.155).

This symbolic cleansing prepares Rick for a fatherly role. It’s not so much an apotheosis as an earthy taking of responsibility, not just for the direction of his own life, but also a desire to care for Sara. This new maturity helps Rick deal with a major burden from the past; by describing his father’s fate, Rick’s irrational guilt, which has arrested his development for so long, is purged. This is shortly followed by the understanding that maybe “there were worse things than not having a father” (TRD p.176). Rick embarks on the last part of his journey stronger, wiser and more mature. And he needs to be all these things, for an even bigger challenge waits.
Rick’s journey – Return

Rick’s status as a hero in Campbell’s terms is ambiguous at the end of The Rope Dancer. Rick’s questioning at the end of the novel reveals that he is aware that he may not have the necessary willpower to accept life in a way that Sara would have wanted. The return home after the heroic journey, what Campbell describes as “the paradoxical, supremely difficult threshold-crossing of the hero’s return from the mystic realm into the land of common day” (Campbell 1949, p.216), can be the hardest stage of the whole enterprise. The hero has seen and understood important things and now has the freedom to live life properly and fully. These insights are of limited value, however, unless they can be suitably digested and then distributed for the benefit of the rest of humanity. Rick returns to Natimuk after his second disastrous trip to Khan Tengri, the Lord of Spirits, not yet fully reconciled to what he has experienced. Rick’s gift to society is to tell the true story of what happened to Sara Smith, to pass on Sara’s real message about life rather than Cat’s distorted version. At the same time, Rick’s narration of The Rope Dancer is an attempt to exercise his will over events, to recreate the world in his own image. When Rick gazes at the Khan Tengri’s summit, he sees that there is nothing there. This is the mountain that once nearly destroyed him and then killed the woman he loved. Instead of going to the top, he takes one last look and then turns to go down. There are more important things in life than making it to the top of the mountain. Rick’s time with Sara was rich and intense, but then he lost her. An implicit question is whether it was worth the pain. If “the secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously”, how is this reconciled with the agony of losing the things you love? “Sara used to say that the way to deal with disappointment was to look at everything as if you wanted it that way.” This is good theory, but hard practice. Is it really possible to regard life in this way? Has Rick learned from Sara that a life lived honestly is at bottom indestructibly powerful and joyful, and all the more poignant because of tragedy? * The resolution of these questions is of utmost importance, for, if Rick is unable to redeem anything of value from his experiences, then his whole life must be judged a failure, and it would have better if he had not been born at all.
iv/ Conclusion

Regardless of whether or not Rick manages to travel those final stages to become the fully individuated hero, Campbell’s concept of the mythic journey is useful heuristically for understanding Rick’s character development in The Rope Dancer. The danger of setting it out in this manner is that it might suggest that Rick’s character was constructed in a coherent and linear way during the writing process. I wish it were that straightforward. Perhaps the most organic aspect of novel writing is the way that characters, once given life, evolve in unexpected ways. The experience of fictional persons becoming animated and, in a sense, independent of the author, is one that many writers recount. Annie Dillard comments on it in the following manner:

Original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds…Fiction writers who toss up their arms helplessly because their characters “take over” – powerful rascals, what is a god to do? – refer, I think, to these structural mysteries that seize any serious work, whether or not it possesses fifth-column characters who wreak havoc from within. Sometimes part of a book simply gets up and walks away. The writer cannot force it back into place (Dillard 1990, p.16).

Over the three or so years that The Rope Dancer took to write, Lou became an increasingly conflicted and fractious character; in the end she was most unlike the person I imagine Louise Salome to have been. Sara initially changed genders, the original Zarathustra character being a male, and then she gradually became less bombastic, eventually retiring to a dignified distance. Rick, once given the licence to tell Sara’s story, took over and made the novel his own. Michael revealed in the second last draft that he had been abused as a child, and this was significant in Rick’s understanding of his relationship to his own father. Original aspects from Nietzsche’s companions or Gatsby’s contemporaries still exist in The Rope Dancer, often in vestigial form. Meanwhile, other features have evolved into completely different kinds of organs. There is something deeply psychological about the way fictional characters play out their lives in the theatre of the novel; the writer is a director with, at best, only partial control.

Chapter FIVE
Conclusion – Aspects of the Novel

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns on to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed – I have never had any choice

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

David Lodge, even as he discusses the novel topic by topic, observes that, “[The] division of the art of fiction into various ‘aspects’ is somewhat artificial. Effects in fiction are plural and interconnected, each drawing on and contributing to all the others” (Lodge 1992, p.56). He is, of course, right, but he is also confident that studying aspects of novels, artificial though the process may be, can enhance understanding, enjoyment and suggest “new possibilities of reading” (p.xi). What, then, has emerged from this essay’s study of particular features of The Rope Dancer? The organic nature of character, and the importance of field research, reveal a great deal about the writing process itself. The relationship of The Rope Dancer to works of fiction and non-fiction reinforce the fact “that intertexuality is the very condition of literature” (Lodge 1992, p.98). Perhaps most importantly an essay such as this can open up the dynamics within a novel, thus suggesting possibilities, but not setting limits, for interpretation.

Mountains form natural metaphors, they offer scope for drama, things for characters to fall off, get lost on and so on. It’s not surprising that mountains and climbing feature in numerous novels. Some commentators are harsh critics of climbing fiction. No doubt, there are examples where the climbing portrayed in novels is unsatisfying to those who consider themselves initiates in the sport, but the blanket criticisms are not to be taken too seriously. There are examples of good novels that use climbing with authenticity and power and, at the same time, add new insights into the experience of human life. Climbing commentators, when they are not simply being arrogant, miss the crucial difference between fiction and non-fiction: while factual descriptions of climbing may be about climbing, fiction is always about the human. I went to some pains to make sure that the climbing in The Rope Dancer is realistic, but climbing is only one aspect of the novel. As well as being positioned under the umbrella of climbing literature, The Rope Dancer is part of a tradition of using Nietzsche in fiction and, indeed, also part of the much larger convention that sees the novel as an exercise in existentialism. No doubt in post modern times the definition of the novel as “an examination of the human condition” is to be regarded with suspicion, but The Rope Dancer, along with The Sea Wolf (1979), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and When Nietzsche Wept (1992) are aiming for just that. Where London, Kundera and Yalom use sailing, sex and psychotherapy as the mechanisms and metaphors for their projects, The Rope Dancer uses climbing. Place, as Eudora Welty points out, can do a number of things, from stimulating the author to defining and provoking character, ultimately even being the crucial instrument for self realisation. Certainly place affects me deeply, and there is an intimate relationship between my desire to seek out natural places and the drive to write as a way of making the experience coherent. This reciprocity between place and author is mirrored by the potential for place to affect character. In The Rope Dancer, as in One Green Bottle (1951), and in a negative way in Solo Faces (1982), mountainous places are pivotal in character development. The description of place offered by phenomenology fits well with this argument that place affects writer and character in crucial ways, and some interesting work could be done in climbing fiction in this regard. Characters come from deep in the imagination and, as with many psychological phenomena, we have at best only partial control over them. I began The Rope Dancer with certain ideas for characters already in mind. People from Nietzsche’s life and then subsequently characters from The Great Gatsby (1926) provided initial raw material. As time passed, some of these characters developed in their own ways, often surprising me with the direction they chose to take. This is one of the great delights in the writing process. Though I steered the personalities as best I could, and Campbell’s concept of the hero shows how mythical structure was a powerful way of organising character, there were many instances where the outcome was a surprise. This process of organic growth occurred not only with individual characters, but with the whole of The Rope Dancer; novels ultimately take on their own shape, rough-hew them how we will.

Another facet of The Rope Dancer is that it illustrates the power of narrative to create meaning. It’s a story about storytelling. Rick tells of the ability of narrative to transform and give significance to the mundane:

[Rory] had an instinctive grasp of rhythm and emphasis that made him a natural storyteller. Often things that happen when you’re climbing are amazing in the experience but mundane in the telling. Rory had a knack of staying true to the meaning of the tale, but of shaping it to create the right emotion. He’d bring in side anecdotes, or even completely make things up, so that the right feeling would come through. Sometimes I’d find myself so drawn in by Rory’s retelling that his story would seem more real than when it actually happened.

“Shape the facts to fit the story,” he’d say in private. And then, with mock profundity, “After all, what is truth?” (TRD p.27).

As Sara would have it, we create the truth when we create truly. For her, the line between art and life was blurred, “she lived her life as if it were a piece of literature” (TRD p.205). Sara’s journal is an interweaving of things that had happened with abstract ideas and fictional anecdotes. When Rick asks her how she remembers what actually happened and what she has made up, Sara replies: “I don’t try.” The novel that Sara did not finish, the one that was re-shaped for the market by Cat, is the one that Rick narrates. ” The Rope Dancer” is, he tells us, the title of the semi-fictional novel that Sara planned. Rick’s story is presented as the authentic version of events in contrast to Cat’s manipulation of the text to suit her purposes, which were to make the book sensational and so sell copies. Maybe she also wanted to protect Rory from criticism. But why should the reader believe Rick? After all, at the start of the story he is quick to say how bad his memory is, and then he proceeds to give a detailed account of his year with Sara. “It’s Sara’s story I want to tell,” Rick claims, but it’s his own story he tells, and surely he has an agenda as much as does Cat. It’s not just what happens around so called facts that gives them significance; it’s also how facts are described that gives them meaning.

Looking at parts of the whole has the potential to open up a novel rather than close it down. The Rope Dancer is a story about climbers, a story about existential reality, a story about the impact of place, and a story about human personality and the search for identity. It is also an exercise in intertextuality and metafiction. Since none of these aspects of the novel are new, how, then, does The Rope Dancer contribute anything original to the world of fiction? Simply, and modestly, in the unique way that these various aspects are combined.
Endnotes

1. Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, working within structuralist and post-structuralists contexts, reveal the extent to which meaning is elusive and the extent to which what is written is ideologically constructed. As Foucault notes, “what is speaking is… in its nothingness, the word itself – not the meaning of the word, but its enigmatic and precarious being” (Foucault 1970, p.305). Barthes also notes the extent to which ideologies are pervasive and often hidden. He points to the presence of “mythologies” behind the ordinary everyday things of the world and demonstrates that cultural interpretations intercede in our perceptions of these things (Barthes, 1972). Derrida, in his exploration of “writing”, could be said to materialise subjectivity, giving priority to the unconscious over the conscious mind in the Freudian sense. Derrida also subverts the old dualisms of mind/body, soul/body, and the traditional hierarchies in philosophy that gave more power to one over the other. Derrida’s emphasis on the signifier and the “trace” breaks down all previous convictions that the “word” has any real relationship to that which it purports to signify (Derrida 1981).

2. Kristeva expresses the new position of the writer well: “The speaking subject is a divided subject, even a pluralised subject, that occupies, not a place of enunciation, but permutable, multiple, and mobile places” (Kristeva, 1980, p.111).

3. I qualify this point because of the tendency for autobiographical novels, driven by theories that represent the marginalised and the exploited, whether from a feminist or post-colonialist view, or by writings on trauma, depression etc, to lead readers in their reception of such texts to be distracted about the individual expression of these conditions and to place emphasis on the “life or the “intention” of the writer.

4. Central to Nietzsche’s works is the idea, and the style, of “perspectivism”. Unlike most philosophers, who argue directly for the truth of a single idea or system, Nietzsche argues for a plurality of perspectives, a plurality of “truths”, with none of them the “true one” (Solomon & Higgins 1987, p.11).
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* In Ecce Homo Nietzsche says: “My father died at the age of thirty-six: he was delicate, lovable and morbid, like a being destined to pay this world only a passing visit. In the same year in which his life declined mine too declined: in the thirty-sixth year of my life I arrived at the lowest point of my vitality - I still lived, but without being able to see three paces in front of me” (Nietzsche 1908, p.8).

* In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that dramatic tragedy provides the “metaphysical consolation that whatever superficial changes may occur, life is at bottom indestructibly powerful and joyful” (Nietzsche 1872, p.39).

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